Abstract:

Various studies have put forward that there are certain factors which affect foreign language learners’ academic success and interest in the course. Among these factors, anxiety holds an important place. Revealing itself with haste, worry and a number of negative emotional reactions, anxiety is categorized in three different types, which are trait anxiety, situational anxiety and state anxiety. The focus of this study is to research whether foreign language classroom anxiety and foreign language reading anxiety of the students learning French as a foreign language differ by gender. The study also tries to identify the causes of foreign language reading anxiety. Both a qualitative and a quantitative study, the research has been conducted with the first-year students (n=45) at Anadolu University Faculty of Education Department of French Language Teaching during the 2015-2016 fall term. Analysing the data gathered from the study, it has been revealed that the male students have more foreign language classroom anxiety and foreign language reading anxiety compared to the female students. Furthermore, it has been observed that those who have foreign language classroom anxiety also have foreign language reading anxiety. The amount of the unknown words in the texts brought to the class, inability to understand the instructions in the texts, students’ insufficient vocabulary, inability to understand questions related to the content of the texts, long sentence forms in the texts, long texts, reading topics that are boring for the students, and shying away from the other students in the class are some examples for the main causes of foreign language reading anxiety.

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