A Model of Foreign Language Anxiety in the Saudi EFL Context

By Fakieh Alrabai. 2014

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Feelings of anxiety are commonly expressed by Saudi learners in their English as a foreign language (EFL) classes. These feelings typically exert detrimental effects on these learners’ foreign language attainment. This paper reports on the findings of a large-scale study for which three data collection iterations were conducted over three years to investigate the levels and sources of foreign language anxiety (FLA) among 1389 Saudi EFL learners. Learners were asked to report the amount of anxiety they typically experienced in English language classes and the potential causes that aroused their feelings of language anxiety. The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) was used to evaluate learners’ anxiety. Descriptive statistics, such as mean and standard deviation, were used to assess the levels of learners’ anxiety, and an explanatory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to identify the sources that evoked learners’ anxiety in classroom-based language learning. Participating learners in the three studies reported moderate to high levels of anxiety, with communication being the key cause of learners’ language anxiety. The three studies’ findings were highly consistent, and thus, we were able to propose a context-based model of FLA in the Saudi EFL context.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/951f4d24f2cb3993409d197997dd439ee5c18597

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Citations in the corpus

Does the effect of enjoyment outweigh that of anxiety in foreign language performance (2018, background): “While the majority of work carried out on FLCA has been conducted in western cultures, it has been picked up by researchers around the globe, including in Saudi Arabia (Al-Saraj, 2011, 2014; Al Asmari, 2015; Alrabai, 2014; Dewaele & Al-Saraj, 2015).”
Factors Underlying Low Achievement of Saudi EFL Learners (2016, methodology): “Alrabai (2014a) highlighted some of these practices, such as the absence of teacher support, unsympathetic teachers, negative student performance evaluations, teachers’ lack of time for personal attention, threatening questioning styles, intolerance of learner errors, harsh correction or…”
Teaching English Speaking Skills to the Arab Students in the Saudi School in Kuala Lumpur: Problems and Solutions. (2018, background): “Researchers such as (Rabab’ah, 2003; Mahboob and Elyas, 2014 and Alrabai, 2014) also concluded that one of the major factors that led to the students’ low level of English is the lack of the target language exposure.”
Education Context and English Teaching and Learning in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: An Overview. (2015, background): “The dominant role of the teacher and the use of Arabic to teach English have resulted in students’ reliance on inappropriate learning strategies such as memorization and rote learning (Alkubaidi, 2014; Almutairi, 2008; Alrabai, 2014; Fareh, 2010; Rajab, 2013).”
Foreign Language Anxiety: A Systematic Review (2019, background): “Alrabai, F. (2014). A Model of Foreign Language Anxiety in the Saudi EFL Context. English language teaching, 7(7), 82-101. Argaman, O., & Abu-Rabia, S. (2002). The influence of language anxiety on English reading and writing tasks among native Hebrew speakers. Language Culture and Curriculum, 15(2),”