EFL Learners’ Anxiety and Their Language Achievement

Anxiety, among other affective variables, has stimulated particular interest in the field of language acquisition and learning in the last decades. According to Rashtchi (2002), anxiety or stress can be a facilitative factor in language learning if it exists in an optimum level. Thus anxiety can have a debilitative role in the process of learning if it is felt too much or too little by learners. Learners who are too anxious obstacle their own amounts of anxiety become irresponsible toward their learning tasks.The present study is designed to investigate the relationship between anxiety and language achievement. For this purpose, 20 senior students were randomly selected from among Iranian EFL learners at Islamic Azad University of Semnan. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire developed by Stein et al. (2001) consisting of 20 statements describing worry reactions and attitudes toward testing situations. After data were gathered, descriptive statistics including the means and the standard deviations were computed to analyze the obtained data. The results of the independent t-test rejected the research null hypothesis and indicated that there is a relationship between students' anxiety and their achievement in language learning. So, facilitating anxiety produces positive effects on learner's performance, too much anxiety may cause a poor performance. Their statements represent a relationship between anxiety and language achievement, which support our finding. This study emphasizes the need for stress and time management programs along with a well-structured curriculum in order to reduce test anxiety in students.

کلیدواژه ها:

EFL(English as a Foreign Language ) ، anxiety ، language achievement ، learning