Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) Working Title: What Causes Foreign Language Anxiety?

Abstract

Learning a foreign language can be challenging to many students. Having to familiarize oneself with an entirely new language and culture is not an easy task to do. This causes anxiety among learners while attending foreign language lessons. Thus, this study is done to investigate the causes of the students’ anxiety upon learning foreign language. 120 respondents from a public university in Malaysia composed of three different French class levels participated in answering this survey. Adapted from Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986), the survey includes communication apprehension, test anxiety and negative evaluation as tools to measure student’s anxiety scale. The survey revealed that the three tools mentioned above are certainly causing learners to be anxious during foreign language lessons. Findings from this quantitative research also projected students’ anxiety scale through means score accordingly with negative evaluation coming as the highest total mean of 3.25. In the face of students' profound anxiety, educators’ role is crucial in minimizing students' worry so that it will not affect students' study.