The role of foreign language anxiety in english lessons of 8th grade students

It has been clearly seen that the positive and negative emotions of the learners have a significant role on their foreign language learning process. As unfavorable emotions have negative effects on most areas, the impact of them on language learning process might be said to be the same. Therefore, many educators or teachers' pay attention to the emotions of their students during language learning or teaching process. Among all of the negative emotions, foreign language anxiety one of the vicious cycles is an important factor that needed to be explored from the past to the present. It is an obvious fact that, students rather than a language environment in which they feel more comfortable do not likely to choose an atmosphere full of stress. So, the aim of this study is firstly to find out the anxiety levels of the students including in this research. After finding the anxiety level of the participants, it tries to determine whether the difference of anxiety level in gender is significant or not. The study at last focused on finding the causes, effects of the foreign language anxiety and the ways how to cope with this feeling from the perspective of the subjects. This study conducted at a state school in Esenyurt, İstanbul and 297 students (152 females and 145 males) participated in the research. The data related to the anxiety level of the participants were collected through a questionnaire including 33 items of four categories such as communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety and general feeling of anxiety. On the other hand, a semi structured interview and an open ended questionnaire involving the same questions in the interview were used in order to find the causes, effects of foreign language anxiety and ways how to cope with it from the participants' perspectives. 32 students participated in the interview process and the data obtained from them were analyzed by means of content analysis. The results of the study revealed that the participants could be accepted slightly anxious due to the results of the applied questionnaire. Additionally, the findings showed that there was no significant difference in anxiety level of the participants in terms of gender. Lastly, according to the data taken from the interview process, students indicated that there were some causes, effects of foreign language anxiety. They also mentioned about some ways which they put emphasis on in order to overcome or decrease this feeling.