Foreign Language Anxiety of Adolescent Students

Anxiety has been a problem to many foreign language students and educators for many years. Studies on the anxiety of students regarding foreign languages have been conducted by educators, foreign language teachers, education experts and researchers. Thus, foreign language anxiety has become the focus of language learning. In the research, attempts have been made to reveal the effect of gender, class levels, and ages of adolescents on the anxiety felt in foreign language classes. Descriptive survey model has been used in this research. Research sample consist of eighty-one (81) students aged 13-15, in the 7th and 8th grade at Adana/Seyhan Mehmet Akif Secondary School, and in the 2016-2017 academic year. The "Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale" prepared and developed through a validity and reliability research, has been used for these randomly selected students. The arithmetic mean, standard deviation, corrected mean and standard error values of scores obtained from Foreign Language Class Anxiety Scale have been calculated. Independent groups t-test and one-way variance analysis have been applied to determine if differences are significant or not. According to the result obtained, it has been determined that there is significant difference in the support of female students from the point of gender factor in foreign language anxiety during adolescence. However, there is no significant difference in grade level and age factors. Considering gender, grade level, and age factors, increasing the number of foreign language anxiety research at all levels has been suggested.