Investigation of students’ motivation and anxiety at the Military Academy ‘General Mihailo Apostolski’ while learning English as a foreign language

Abstract

Consideration of learners’ anxiety reactions in learning to speak another language by a language teacher is deemed highly important in order to assist them to achieve the intended performance goals in the target language. This study has attempted to investigate the factors that language anxiety can possibly stem from, both within the classroom environment and out of classroom in the wider social context, and the motivation needed for improving that anxiety by giving recommendations of a variety of strategies to cope with it. This study used a qualitative semi-structured interview format and a focus-group discussion technique to investigate the issue. Students of the Military Academy - ESL/EFL learners participated in the investigation. The findings suggest that language anxiety can originate from learners’ own sense of ‘self’, their self-related cognition, language learning difficulties, differences in learners’ and target language cultures, differences in the social status of the speakers and interlocutors, and from the fear of losing self-identity. The pedagogical implications of these findings for understanding second/foreign language anxiety for enhancing learners’ communication abilities in the target language were discussed in accordance to the anxiety level with the motivation needed, as are suggestions for future research.