Abstract:

The aim of this research is to develop a scale to measure the anxiety levels of high school students towards the English course. The study group consists of a total of 302 high school students from 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades studying in Anatolian, science, vocational, sports and private high schools located in the city center of Elazığ. The “Foreign Language Anxiety Questionnaire” developed by Doğan (2008) was used as a data collection tool in the research. The questionnaire consists of a total of 26 items and was prepared in a likert form, in which the answers are given as "Strongly Agree", "Agree", "No Idea", "Disagree", "Strongly Disagree". In order to convert the questionnaire into a scale and to ensure its validity and reliability, first of all, the questionnaire items were subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis on the data obtained from 153 students. At the beginning, questionnaire had a five-point Likert structure consisting of 27 items and 11 of them were found to be overlapping and were removed from the scale, and a three-factor structure consisting of 16 items was obtained. These factors are named as “Speaking Anxiety”, “Failure Anxiety” and “Exposure Anxiety”. It was determined that the total explained variance of the scale was 60.82%. Then, Confirmatory Factor Analysis was performed on the data obtained from 149 students different from the first group, and the internal consistency coefficient obtained for the whole scale was determined as .94. Thanks to this scale, the anxiety levels of individuals studying at high schools can be revealed and which situations increase their anxiety levels towards the English course can be determined. Therefore, the effectiveness of foreign language lessons can be increased by taking necessary precautions for students with high foreign language anxiety.

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