Preservice EFL teachers’ online learning anxiety

Abstract

With a prompt rise in the development of technology and with the advent of the internet in the 1990s, walls of classrooms have been demolished by the innovations of the current century. These developments also breathe new life into foreign language education and change the concept of the classroom while casting challenging roles for both learners and instructors, which ends up a new type of education on the stage of online education platforms. This brand-new way of foreign language learning has brought about extra anxiety in learners. In order to find out the reasons for foreign language anxiety, which affects learners’ process of foreign language learning in the online world, a total number of 75 undergraduate foreign language learners (n=75) who are taking online oral communication courses in the English Language Teacher Education Program (the Spring of the academic year 2019-2020) at Ondokuz Mayıs University in Turkey are involved in this research voluntarily. This study aims to investigate what kind of effects online learning has on foreign language learners’ anxiety in the process of online foreign language education, what the challenges are for online foreign language learners, how learners perceive online foreign language education, and what the learners' perceived reasons are for anxiety in an online foreign language learning environment through semi-structured interview forms. Certain significant factors which affect learners’ foreign language learning anxiety in an online world context have been determined. Some certain suggestions are made to alleviate the foreign language anxiety levels of the learners in online foreign language learning contexts.