Online language learning anxiety among English language learners / Tarishini Visvalingam and Prasanna Kesavan

With the announcement of the Movement Control Order (MCO) in March 2020, the education landscape in Malaysia had changed drastically. Academic institutions at various levels have taken measures to ensure that learners’ education is not disrupted. Academicians have immediately started to realize that there should be a paradigm shift in their Teaching and Learning methods. Hence, online learning became the key player in the Malaysian education world. This sudden shift in the method of Teaching and Learning is bound to cause anxieties among learners. This small-scale study intends to identify online language learning anxiety faced by first time online language learners and determine which domain of anxiety causes more anxiousness among them. A group of learners who are currently enrolled in English language courses while undertaking various programs in a Malaysian polytechnic participated in this study. These are the group of learners who had to embarked in a new semester in an online manner for the first time. An Online Language Learning Anxiety (OLLA) inventory was administered to a total of 94 learners of English language. The data was analyzed using the SPSS package. The findings revealed that factors such as Attributes of online English language learning and Motivation for online English language learning are the most important factors contributing to their anxiousness. These findings may be able to guide institutions, academicians and counselling staff to offer support to online leaners in completing their courses successfully.