The Relationship between the Anxiety Level of Iranian Elementary EFL Learners and their Vocabulary Learning Strategies

The current study aimed at examining the relationship between anxiety level of Iranian elementary EFL learners and the strategies that they adopt for learning English vocabulary. To this end, based on the performance of the participants on the Quick Placement Test, the researcher recruited ۱۰۰ participants through availability sampling. To determine the strategies that the participants employ for learning English vocabulary, Schmitt’s (۱۹۹۷) taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire was administered. The findings of the current study indicated that Iranian elementary EFL students were medium vocabulary learning strategy users. The social strategy was found as the most frequently used category of strategies, followed by memory, determination, cognitive and metacognitive strategy. Moreover, the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope, ۱۹۸۶) was employed to determine the anxiety level of the participants. The results showed that the participants were moderately anxious. And according to the descriptive statistics of three levels of anxiety, low and moderate anxious students used mostly social and memory strategies and the high anxious students used social and metacognitive strategies. Also, the Spearman correlation was run to determine the correlation between different levels of anxiety and different vocabulary learning strategies. The results indicate that there is a negative significant correlation between the anxiety level of participants and the overall vocabulary learning strategies they use for English vocabulary learning. In other words, the findings of the current study indicated that the effects of anxiety can adversely affect a person's use of vocabulary learning strategies. Likewise, when there is an increase in anxiety, vocabulary learning strategy use decreases to a significant extent.

کلیدواژه ها:

vocabulary learning ، vocabulary learning strategies ، foreign language classroom anxiety scale