Language Anxiety Among Selected Filipino High School Learners: A Sequential Explanatory Analysis

Understanding learners’ language anxiety levels and the factors that affect it is essential in helping them learn English more effectively. In the Philippines, despite the status and wide use of English as one of the official languages in the country, Filipino high school learners still find language learning very challenging. Thus, this mixed-methods study aimed to explore the nature of their language anxiety using the sequential explanatory design. The respondents of the study were 59 learners, with ages ranging from 14 to 16, enrolled in the blended distance learning modality of the Iloilo National High School-School for the Arts for the school year 2020-2021. Since the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale is one of the most widely used instruments in studying language anxiety across different learning contexts, the same instrument, paired with individual interviews, was utilized to gather data. Mean and standard deviation were the statistical tools used to analyze learners’ anxiety scores and their level of anxiety. Based on the quantitative data, 12 learners with moderate to high levels of anxiety participated in individual interviews to further explore the nature of their anxiety and the factors that affect it, providing more insights into their responses in the survey and their anxiety levels. All learners were also asked to keep a journal as a supplementary source of data, and both interview responses and journal entries were analyzed thematically. The general results of the study show that the selected Filipino high school learners experienced language anxiety that negatively affected their learning. Aside from communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test anxiety, learners were also affected by other factors not covered by the FLCAS, especially since they were in a distance learning setup.