The impact of gender on the foreign language anxiety of the yemeni university students

Abstract

University students have to communicate using FL in the classrooms. This demand makes students anxious and leads to FL anxiety. This study aims to measure the levels of FL anxiety perceived by the Yemeni students of the English Department in the Faculty of Education at Hodeidah University. It also investigates the relationship between FL anxiety and gender among male and female students with regard to their educational level, age and residence. An Arabic, adapted, piloted and revised version of the FLCA scale (Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope 1986) is used. It is found that students (males and females) have a high level of FL anxiety but female-students' anxiety is higher than male-students'. Like gender, age and residence factors strongly contribute to FL anxiety. However, there is no significant difference of the levels of anxiety between the two levels. Ultimately, the study brings about pedagogically based suggestions to alleviate students' FL anxiety.