Exploring rural secondary students’ English language learning anxiety: A study on secondary students of Bauphal, Patuakhali, Bangladesh

Abstract

For more than a decade second language researchers, psychologists and language practitioners have found out multifarious impact of anxiety on language learning process. Realizing its’ significance in the EFL context of Bangladesh, this study has explored the anxieties of rural secondary school students in learning English and offered some specific suggestions to reduce it. This mixed approach research collected quantitative data by administering Foreign Language Anxiety scale and gathered qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 20 students of 10 secondary schools of Bauphal upzilla, Pautakhali. Quantitative data was put in SPSS version 22 for statistical analysis and presented graphically and qualitative data was interpreted thematically. Results revealed that secondary students in this rural context experienced English language learning anxiety as about 68.44% of students were anxious about negative evaluation; 51.27% about classroom anxiety; 61.2% about test anxiety and 60.88% about communicating in English. Findings of this study have implications for the English language teachers of secondary and higher secondary levels particularly in the rural areas by drawing their attention to learners’ foreign language anxiety (FLA) as a major barrier to learning English and by suggesting them some possible ways to lessen it and for the academicians who aspire to come up with effective teaching methodologies considering the contextual variations to maximize foreign language learning outputs