THE LEVEL OF ANXIETY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING AMONG FIRST YEAR STUDENTS IN AN ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

One obstacle that students possibly have in learning English is anxiety. Anxiety could interfere with students in learning English and it make the uncomfortable feeling for students in learning English language process. This study purposed to investigate the level of anxiety in foreign language learning among first year students in an English Language Education Department. For the further result, it provides the level of anxiety that ELED’s students have and about the anxiety level of three domain categories of anxiety, namely communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation in learning English. A descriptive quantitative research design was used as a research method of this study. This research was conducted at one of the private universities in Yogyakarta. The populations were 168 students of this research. The data were gathered using the questionnaire that was adapted from Horwitz et al., (1986), and it contains 33 items and there are three factors of anxiety that have been included in the questionnaire. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics by seeing the total means score of the result. The result showed that the overall of anxiety at first year students in an English Language Education Department was in low level anxiety with the mean score 81.17. Moreover, the result for the three factors of anxiety revealed that the students were in low level anxiety in communication apprehension with the mean score of 27.42. Then, in test anxiety the students were in low level anxiety with the mean score of 34.78 and for the fear of negative evaluation the students were in high level anxiety with the mean score of 18.63.