Foreign language anxiety among ethiopian university EFL students

Abstract

The study was; designed to investigate anxiety level of Ethiopian university students who were studying English as a major. It was also aimed to examine if anxiety level is significantly varied by gender. Background information questionnaire and FLCAS; which was developed by (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986) were used to gather the necessary information for further analyses. 103 respondents from four EFL classes of two Ethiopian universities were successfully participating in the study. In this study, the mean; anxiety level of the students was 3.47 (SD=0.45) which is above the average i.e., 3.00, and the descriptive analysis revealed that large number (83.5%) of students were suffering from some levels of anxiety ranging from medium- to high level. The analyses also showed that most students had higher level of communication apprehension compared to the other domains of anxiety proposed by Na (2007). Lastly, the independent t-test analysis revealed that female students were found significantly higher level of English language anxiety (t=-4.049, p=0.000).