Investigating the Relationship between Language Skills Anxiety and Foreign Language Learning Aptitude among Iranian EFL Learners

The rationale behind this study is that though poor achievement is attributable to the negative effects of anxiety which is said to interfere with cognitive processes, the importance of foreign language learning aptitude which may have confounded the issue, has been misinterpreted. Thus, the main aim of this study was to see if a significant relationship existed between skill-based anxieties and language learning aptitude of Iranian EFL learners. To this effect, 240 EFL learners studying English in three language institutes from the upper intermediate and advanced proficiency levels were selected based on convenient nonrandom sampling procedure. They completed the LLAMA, FLLAS, FLSAS, FLRAS and the FLWAS self-report questionnaires. Their relationships were analyzed using the Spearman rank order coefficient of correlation, which is a non-parametric formula. The results indicated that a statistically significant relationship existed between language aptitude and all the specific skill- based anxieties of Iranian EFL learners. Interestingly, the results also showed that the significance in the relationship between the EFL learners’ language aptitude and reading anxiety was comparative lower than that of the other three skill-based anxieties. Thus, this study identifies another important contributing factor of skill-based anxieties in the EFL context to probably be learners’ foreign language aptitude. This study not only provides statistical evidence of the relationship among these variables but it also stresses the importance of EFL learners’ language aptitude to their skill-based anxieties.

کلیدواژه ها:

Language Skills Anxiety ، Foreign Language Learning Aptitude