A Study into the Perceptions and Comparison of Foreign Language Teaching Anxiety among Novice and Experienced Iranian High School Teachers

The importance of psychological factors of daily life and workplace cannot be unseen, and anxiety is one of the main concern of teaching profession which affects teachers throughout the years. Therefore, the aim of this study is to find out the perception and comparison of foreign language teaching anxiety among novice and experienced Iranian high school teachers with help of a 26-items questionnaire conducted by Ipek (2006). In order to conduct the study, the researcher asked 76 participants (31 novice and 45 experienced Iranian EFL high school teachers) to fill out the questionnaire. The researcher chose her participants by convenience sampling. After gathering the data, the researcher analyzed the data with the help of SPSS version 22. In order to analyze the data, the comparative and descriptive analyses were applied. The results have shown that the novice teachers face with teaching anxiety when they had to teach skills, when teaching to high proficient students and when having grammatical mistakes. On the other hand, the experienced participants suffer from teaching anxiety when they teach language skills (i.e. writing and speaking) and when answering to grammar questions. Also, the relationship between years of experience and teaching anxiety among novice and experienced teachers was examined and the results have shown that there is a significant negative relationship among these two groups and the findings are discussed in the light of literature. This study had some implications and suggestions for administrators and teachers

Keywords:

anxiety , teaching anxiety , experienced teachers , novice teachers , teaching english as a foreign language