Correlating the Impact of Aptitude and Anxiety toward Learning Foreign Language

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of foreign language anxiety on learning aptitude and to investigate if there is a substantial impact of learners’ gender on foreign language anxiety, learning aptitude and language achievement. The number of participants involved is 43 international students (31 male, 12 female) studying in various subjects. In order to generate data, participants completed the following measurements: the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale developed by Horwitz (1986), the LLAMA aptitude test, and the X-lex vocabulary size test. The findings in this research suggest a moderate to strong correlation between apprentices’ learning aptitude and foreign language anxiety. In addition, the results revealed no correlation between foreign language anxiety and language performance. Furthermore, the impact of gender was in a weak relationship with language anxiety, while no correlation was found with language performance. Finally, some suggestions are made for students to overcome language anxiety and for instructors to reduce anxiety in the language classroom.