The Online World Languages Anxiety Scale (OWLAS)

Abstract

Sadly, anxiety and stress exist all around us. While anxiety has previously been studied in traditional foreign language environments, no information exists about anxiety in an online foreign language environment. Without having a detailed understanding of potential problems in an online environment, educators, administrators, and course designers would not be able to help struggling, suffering students. Thus, the purpose of this seven-participant pilot study was to develop a more refined understanding of foreign language anxiety in the online learning environment. In some respects, the results of this study confirm what foreign language educators already know: students prefer writing rather than speaking, interacting with the instructor rather than with peers, and keeping up with the work is sometimes a challenge. Additionally, if students don't know basic grammatical elements in their native language, there may be issues in the target language. Yet, researchers can now begin to understand additional components of anxiety that were not examined previously in online foreign language courses in a more nuanced manner.

Preservice EFL teachers’ online learning anxiety

“…Although it has been discovered that even if they feel anxious, they still favor writing rather than speaking because they have a chance to check what they have done properly before submitting their work. The present findings seem to be consistent with other research conducted by Chametzky (2019), who reveals that language learners taking foreign language courses online experience anxiety in this sense due to misinterpretation of their written or oral responses. A possible explanation for this might be previous negative experiences of learners about misinterpretations of their responses by instructors.…”

“…Nearly one third of the learners feel overwhelmed by various grammatical rules they are required to figure out to speak a foreign language effectively. This also accords with the study conducted by Chametzky (2019). It is also ascertained that some learners who are ambivalent about their feelings do not care about grammatical rules at all.…”

“…Quantitative data are analyzed and presented respectively regarding the 12 main categories included in the OWLAS (Chametzky, 2019). The data analysis from the semi-structured online interview forms includes the following phases of content analysis: transcribing, organizing, coding, interrelating, interpreting the data, and building theories from it (Creswell, 2014).…”

“…While nearly thirty percent of the learners imply that their attitudes would be different while around another thirty percent of them state there would be no difference if COVID-19 never exists. The learners who consider their attitudes would be different make statements grounding on several reasons which are generally based on stress resulting from the coronavirus pandemic and lack-of-sociability which are also determined in the study conducted by Chametzky (2019) as anxiety increasing factors in an online education setting.…”

The Role of Classroom Contexts on Learners’ Grit and Foreign Language Anxiety: Online vs. Traditional Learning Environment

“…They found that employment is significantly correlated with online learning and anxiety levels. Chametzky (2019) also stated that face-to-face interaction in traditional classrooms as a natural discipline in foreign language learning is not as ambiguous as online language learning. Therefore, it is obvious to anticipate foreign language classroom anxiety in distance learning contexts more than traditional ones.…”