A study of sources of foreign language classroom anxiety in speaking and writting classes

The recent literature in language learning and teaching mainly focuses on language learners and their perspectives about the language learning process. ît İs now known that any teaching and learning will be affected by factors beyond the four walls of the classroom, and these factors will be effective on the motivation of the learners, their attitude and the effort they are prepared to make to achieve their goals. One of the current challenges in second and foreign language teaching, regardless of the method, is to provide learners a classroom environment in which they can adopt positive attitudes, a high motivation and use appropriate strategies İn order to become more effective language learners. On the other hand, it is also known that language anxiety prevents learners from adopting effective learning practices in the classroom situation. As a result, second/foreign language teaching recently aims at providing students with a learner- centered and anxiety-free classroom environment to help them become more successful language learners. This study was designed in order to find out the sources of foreign language anxiety Turkish students learning English as a foreign language experience in two productive skills; speaking and writing. The range and degree of foreign language anxiety of 36 intermediate level language learners were determined by using the questionnaire FLCAS (Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale), and considering the answers they gave to the questionnaire each of the subjects was assigned to one of the three anxiety levels, high, medium and low. All of the subjects were then told to keep personal diaries about their speaking and writing classes for four weeks. Randomly selected 12 subjects were also interviewed in order to credit or discredit evidence of foreign language anxiety. Meanwhile, all the subjects were administered the questionnaire BALLI (Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory) to examine whether or not their beliefs about the language learning had any effects on their anxiety. Analysis of the learners' comments both in the diaries and the interviews for each skill revealed three main sources of foreign language anxiety. Learners reported that the anxiety they felt caused by personal reasons -negative self assessment of ability, selfcomparison to other students, high personal expectations, and their irrational beliefs about language learning-; their teachers' manner -towards learners and towards their error- and the teaching procedures in speaking -speaking in front of the classroom, making oral presentations, studying individually-, and writing classes -writing in the paragraph form-. Finally, implications of the findings for foreign language teaching / learning are also discussed in the study.