A study on the university students' perceived sources of foreign language anxiety

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) has always been a source of interest for the researchers. It is a known fact that recent literature in language learning process mainly focuses on the attitudes and perspectives towards language learning. One of the essential ways in foreign language teaching is to create an effective classroom atmosphere in which students can develop positive attitudes, express their ideas freely and adopt high motivation in language learning environment. Our role as educators is to be good models and facilitators to moderate learning and to provide students with opportunities to use suitable strategies to realize the goals of language learning process. The main purpose of the current study was to find out the possible sources of anxiety in EFL classes. The instruments used in this study were a foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS), which was developed by Horwitz and Cope (1986), and semi-structured interviews. Then, one research question was built up to investigate the answers throughout the study. The findings gathered through the instruments indicated that the anxiety, which was encountered by learners in language classes, was mainly caused by communication apprehension, test anxiety, fear of negative evaluation and classroom procedures.