University summer school students' foreign language anxiety levels

Abstract

The relationship between anxiety and language learning has been scrutinized since the 1960s. Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986) proposed a situation-specific foreign language anxiety scale to search students' uncomfortable experiences and negative emotional reactions to language learning. By using this scale, I aimed to investigate foreign language anxiety level of a group of university summer school students taking English as a common compulsory course. Although the participants were the ones who suffered from repeated failure in English, their anxiety level was found to be moderate. Also, they mostly blamed their previous learning experiences for their present foreign language anxiety. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Huseyin Uzunboylu