Browsing by Author "Wikström, Ronja"

This study examines the phenomenon of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) in the Finnish lower and upper secondary school EFL classrooms from the teacher’s point of view. The purpose of the study is to find out how current lower secondary and upper secondary school EFL teachers in Finland view the phenomenon and how their possible previous personal experiences with FLA might inform their current teaching strategies. The study simultaneously examines the attitudes and beliefs of the teachers towards the phenomenon in order to answer the research questions it proposes. The study is inherently qualitative in nature as it uses as its primary data interviews of seven English teachers teaching at schools around Finland. The semi-structured interviews conducted for the study probed into the thoughts of the participants in order to gain insight into their beliefs and teaching strategies. By means of a thematic analysis of the data, multiple common themes were identified in relation to the symptoms of FLA as well as strategies to deal with FLA. The opinions the teachers had on these strategies differed somewhat when it came to matters such as accommodation and pushing students dealing with FLA to participate in activities. One out of the seven teachers who took part in the study shared that they had experienced FLA in the past which made possible a contrastive analysis between the practices and attitudes of teachers who had and those who had not had previous personal experiences of FLA. The results of the study concluded that the teacher who had had previous personal experience with FLA was more hesitant to push the students outside of their comfort zone and preferred to be more flexible when it came to their teaching strategies as well as ways of assessment. Next to this, it was clear that the majority of the teachers, even if they had not had previous personal experiences with the phenomenon, were still willing to learn about the topic and how to deal with it. This was evident in the way that all of the teachers agreed that FLA should be taught about more, both to future teachers as well as current teachers. Future studies should investigate this phenomenon from the point of view of the student, as well as in the context of the Finnish EFL classroom at large.