The relationship between speaking anxiety and the motivation of anatolian high school students in english language classes

This study investigated the relationship between language speaking anxiety and the motivation. The study also investigated the correlation between the motivational orientations and speaking anxiety in terms of gender and department. The study was conducted at Zühtü Günaştı Anatolian High School (in Mersin), with the participation of 110 students, 50 of whom from the Language Department and 60 from the other Departments at the school. Two questionnaires and interviews were the data collection tools. The Motivation / Attitude Questionnaire (MAQ) is an adapted version of Dörnyei (1990), which was adapted by Mendi (2009) to determine the motivational orientations, has thirty items in total. The other questionnaire was Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Scale (FLSAS) of Horwitz et al(1986), which was developed by Saltan (2003) to measure the speaking anxiety in her study and found to be reliable. After the questionnaires were administered, ten students were selected randomly for the interviews. Seven interview questions were asked to the participants to get in-debt data for the analysis. The analysis of the quantitative data which revealed that the participants had a moderate level of foreign language speaking anxiety, and a moderate level of motivation. And when the data were analyzed more in detail, it was found that female students have higher integrative orientation while males have a high instrumental orientation. The difference and relationship between motivational orientations and speaking anxiety got more significant when the difference between the motivational orientations and departments were analyzed. It was found out in the study that speaking anxiety and motivational orientations are negatively correlated and this correlation is the highest and the most significant with the participants of language department when the participants are female and have a high level of integrative orientation.