Does High Anxiety Decrease Motivation for Learning English as a Foreign Language?

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between the level of foreign language anxiety experienced by Saudi female English learners at a Saudi university and the level of their motivation in learning English as a foreign language. The participants were 40 female second-year university students. The instruments the researchers used to gather the data were two questionnaires: Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope’s (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and Gardner’s (2006) Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB). The data were analyzed by calculating the percentages of students’ responses to each item. The findings revealed that Saudi female English learners at King Saud University experienced high levels of foreign language anxiety. The findings also revealed that the learners were highly motivated to learn English. This demonstrates that a high level of motivation to learn English does not prevent the occurrence of a significant level of anxiety. That is, motivation can control foreign language anxiety and assist anxious learners in their determination to learn English.

The Notion of Emotion in EFL Learning and Teaching in Saudi Arabia: A Critical Review of 20 Years of Research

“…Their study samples included participants of both genders; a dedicated female research assistant was hired to recruit and collect data from female participants in each of the two studies. Nonetheless, some of the studies that we have discussed here (e.g., Almurshed & Aljuaythin, 2019;Al Yami, 2015;Fodah, 2013;Massri, 2017) are vulnerable to criticism concerning the size of their participant samples.…”

“…The relationship between learner anxiety and other emotional factors has been investigated in the Saudi setting. A study by Almurshed and Aljuaythin (2019) revealed completely contradictory findings in relation to the association between learner anxiety and motivation: learners were found to be highly motivated to learn English but reported experiencing high levels of FLA. This surprising finding contradicted a well-established conclusion in the L2 research (see, e.g., Liu, 2012;Tahernezhad, Behjat, & Kargar, 2014) that language anxiety is negatively correlated with language motivation (i.e., high levels of language anxiety usually lead to a low of motivation in learners, and vice versa).…”

Relación entre la motivación y la ansiedad durante el aprendizaje de la lengua inglesa en estudiantes del Colegio Integrado de Puerto Wilches

“…Teniendo en cuenta los resultados encontrados entre el nivel de motivación alto y ansiedad lingüística media es posible contrastar esta investigación con en el estudio Does high anxiety decrease motivation for learning english as a foreign language? realizado porAlmurshed (2019) en el cual se investigó el rol de la motivación sobre el control de la ansiedad y su relación en el aprendizaje de los idiomas extranjeros en 40 estudiantes saudíes utilizando el FLCASde Horwitz et al (1986) y el nivel de motivación usando el AMTB de Gardner(2006). SegúnAlmurshed (2019), los hallazgos revelaron altos niveles de ansiedad lingüística y altos niveles de motivación, interpretando estos resultados en que la ansiedad lingüística no es un predictor negativo de la motivación en el aprendizaje de idiomas, puesto que ambas variables coexistían entre sí.…”