Comparative analysis of foreign language (English) anxiety level in distance and face to face education environments

Foreign language anxiety is a topic that has been studied for a long time.The conducted studies are generally focused on the foreign language anxiety in the face to face education environment. There are a few studies on the foreign language anxiety in the distance education, the available ones are generally the studies researching the university students in the distance education. This thesis study compares the foreign language anxieties of the students in the face to face education environment and the synchronous learning environment, one of the types of the distance education, which has been taken in the Covid-19 pandemic period and aims to find if any increase or decrease has happened in the foreign language anxiety of the students. Then it has been studied to find how the distance education and face to face education affects the speech anxiety, negative evaluation anxiety, test anxiety and the negative attitudes against the foreign language and it has been identified which education environment provides a better environment in terms of the foreign language anxiety. In this context, the foreign language classroom anxiety scale was applied to the secondary and high school students in Konya province, Meram county.Then 10 students involved in the questionnaire and 4 teachers were randomly chosen and their views on the semistructured interview questions were taken in a written or oral way in order to reach to the findings that were not reached with the quantitative data and obtain a detailed information about the topic. As a result of the analysis, it was not found any difference between the foreign language anxiety of the students in the face to face education environment and the distance education and the foreign language anxiety in the both education environment showed the positive relation. In the qualitative analysis in which the students' and the teachers' views were examined, it was resulted that the face to face education environment provides a better education environment for the foreign language (English). It was shown that the nature of the distance education, which is lack of communication and interaction, affected the foreign language learning requiring communication in a negative way.