Anxiety levels of novice and experienced EFL instructors: Istanbul Aydin University case

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the anxiety beliefs of a group of Turkish EFL (English as a foreign language) instructors towards teaching as a profession. To collect the data, Foreign Language Teaching Anxiety Scale prepared by Ipek (2006) was used in this study. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the scale was computed as 0.98, which implies high reliability. In addition to descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test was used to find out the correlation between experience year and anxiety beliefs. According to the findings, anxiety levels of experienced instructors were lower than novice instructors and there was a highly significant relationship (p=.002) between years of experience and anxiety levels of instructors. In this sense, the factors affecting the anxiety of novice teachers can be studied and suggestions to lower anxiety levels might be offered. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.