Abstract:

Anxiety is one of the major factors that affect foreign language teaching. Accordingly, the role of anxiety in foreign language teaching and its nature is especially important for foreign language teaching researchers. Nevertheless, despite the numerous studies carried out in the field for about three decades, the relation between anxiety and gender still remains an issue in need of clarification. What is more, the relation between anxiety and foreign language learning achievement is also another ambiguous issue with its mostly positive but occasionally negative findings. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to make a contribution to the literature with a clear-cut projection via investigating the relation between students’ foreign language classroom anxiety levels, and their gender as well as their achievements. The participants of the study were the third-year students of the English Language and Literature Department of Selcuk University. Horwitz’s (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) was distributed to the third-year students in Oral Communication II course and, then their anxiety levels were juxtaposed with their gender differences and their achievement scores respectively. The results indicated unusual findings that are expected to serve new benefits for the interests of foreign language teaching researchers.

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