Anxiety in Learning English as a Second Language at a Tertiary Stage: Causes and Solutions

Abstract

This study aimed at exploring the causes of anxiety that freshmen English as a second language college students may feel when they transfer from secondary education to tertiary education. The sample of the study consisted of 70 female students enrolling in Level 1 Foundation ESL Center in the Community College of Qatar. To collect the data, a Five-Likert 40 item questionnaire was designed by the researcher. Its items were based on Horwitz’s battery for anxiety detection, with some adaptation to the specific situation in CCQ.  Means and standard deviations of the subjects’ answers revealed that their anxiety was due to three main domains: communication apprehension due to discrepancy between secondary education and college education, test anxiety due to the unfair breakdown of grades, and the unified tests and fear of negative evaluation. The researcher suggests several recommendations for instructors, students, and administrators to solve the problem of students’ anxiety.