The Presence of Anxiety within the Framework of ELE : A study which Delves into Students' Anxiety and the Factors Influencing it

The aim of this essay is to identify if students experience anxiety in oral contexts during their Spanish classes. The aim is also to investigate what factors affect the potential anxiety, and determine the factor that influences the students to the greatest extent. The present study is an empirical study consisting of questionnaires carried out with 163 students from two different schools, one lower secondary school and one upper secondary school. The students study Spanish as a foreign language in four different course levels, from levels 1 to 4.Anxiety in oral contexts when studying a foreign language is a well known phenomenon within the area of foreign language adquisition. Accordingly, this study aims to, on the one hand, either confirm or disprove the hypothesis that students experience anxiety. On the other hand, the aim is to find out a potential correlation between the students’ self-assessed proficiency levels of Spanish and their reported levels of anxiety. Lastly, the study aims to determine whether the teachers of the questioned students has knowledge of what the students’ answers will be.The results given by the questionnaire show that the vast majority of the students experience anxiety, not only in terms of the course of Spanish in general but also in terms of an oral context. In order to determine if there are any correlations between the variables in question, a series of statistical tests are applied and analysed. The results have shown that there exists a correlation between the students’ self-assessed proficiency levels of Spanish and their reported levels of anxiety. According to the teachers’ answers, the results show that they are, in most cases, not in line with the students’ answers