How Is Anxiety Perceived? Reflections from Native and Non-native Instructors in Higher Education

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that language anxiety is one of the biggest challenges in the language learning process. It is frequently observed when teaching speaking and writing skills. Although there is a growing interest in examining the potential reasons and possible solutions to this concept, there are not many studies that have investigated the beliefs of native and non-native EFL instructors at the tertiary level. To fill this gap and contribute to the related literature, this study investigated and explored native and non-native teachers’ beliefs associated with factors affecting language anxiety and giving suggested solutions to this complicated notion. The study was carried out with 21 EFL instructors at a prep school of a foundation university in Turkey. Semi-structured interviews and open-ended questions were employed to collect the data. The qualitative data were analyzed with the content analysis method to obtain the results. The findings of the study indicated that there is not a significant difference between native and non-native teachers’ beliefs in terms of language anxiety in productive skills. On the other hand, native teachers believe that learners have more trouble with writing than speaking skills whereas non-native teachers believe vice versa. It is suggested that giving constructive feedback and building up a rapport between teachers and learners will help overcome language anxiety in productive skills.

Keywords

• Language anxiety
• EFL
• writing apprehension
• speaking anxiety

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