Ayhan İNCİRCİ, SELÇUK TURAN, Esra ÖZTÜRK

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOREIGN LANGUAGE ANXIETY AND CRITICAL THINKING TENDENCY: A PATH ANALYSIS

The success of foreign language teaching depends on a number of variables including motivation, teaching methods and techniques, background knowledge etc. One of these variables is foreign language anxiety on which numerous studies have been conducted. These studies generally focus on the reasons of anxiety, how to eliminate them, the correlation between achievement and anxiety, etc. However, there is a scarcity of research about the relationship between anxiety and critical thinking tendency. This study aims to fill in this gap by determining what kind of a relationship (positive or negative) there is between these two concepts. The study has been conducted in Turkey with 136 high school students. Critical Thinking Tendency Scale (Semerci,2015) and Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (Aydın, Harputlu, Güzel & Genç, 2016) have been used as data collection tools. Data have been analyzed through path analysis and the findings show that there is a positive correlation between critical thinking tendency and foreign language anxiety. It is expected that foreign language teachers consider this finding when designing the classroom activities. Depending on the results of current study, it can be said that low level of FLA is essential in the foreign language classrooms. FLA is not the only variable effecting the foreign language learning environment, so it can be suggested to conduct new research on the effects of other variables along with FLA on foreign language learning environments.

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