Foreign Language Anxiety: Exploring Across Gender

Abstract

Knowing multiple languages has always been an advantage to a person be it for work purposes or for personal gain. However, learning foreign languages is not a walk in the park. Most of the learners experience difficulty during foreign language lessons. Thus, this study is done to investigate one of the common students’ struggles, which is foreign language anxiety especially in the context of genders. 100 participants consisting of 50 female students and 50 male students were purposely chosen from a public university in Malaysia to answer a quantitative survey adapted from Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986). The survey is divided into 3 sections including communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety. Data extracted from both survey and SPSS revealed that students are indeed feeling anxious during foreign language classes particularly in the context of fear of negative evaluation. Findings from this study also shows that there is no significant anxiety level difference between female and male students though female students show a slightly higher number. Thus, despite the gender differences, educators ought to help students who experience difficulty during lessons.