Impacts of school climate and instructional practices towards English language anxiety / Noor Illi Elas

This research focused on analysing the factors which could influence English Language Anxiety (ELA) among secondary students in selected Malaysian public schools. Learning English language as a second language, Malaysian students often face different states and levels of anxiety. As a result, the students would have developed particular types of anxiety unconsciously in learning English Language. Additionally, other potential factors that could lead to the students' anxiety are the school climate and Instructional Practices. Hence, this research set out to explore the potential influence school climate and instructional practices have on students' English language anxiety. To investigate the potential influence of the school climate and instructional practices on students' English Language anxiety, this research employed a quantitative research design involving 469 Form Four students who responded to i) an adapted questionnaire known as the English Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (ELCAS), ii) a selfdeveloped questionnaire known as School Climate English Language Anxiety (SCELa) and iii) an adopted Instructional Practices questionnaire. Data was analysed using SPSS and the influence of the independent variables (school climate and instructional practices) on the students' English Language anxiety were measured by means of analysing the regression analysis. The findings have yielded interesting sets of salient findings in this research. First, it was discovered that the students were having high level of anxiety and Test Anxiety was the most dominant language anxiety faced by the students. Next, from the school climate variables, the Physical and Academic dimensions were found to have influence the students' language anxiety. Whereas, from the instructional practices variable, Mastery Oriented and Cognitive Stimulation and Autonomy in English learning seem to have influence the students' language anxiety. Based on the findings, some implications have been drawn which are; teachers can focus on how to reduce the high level of anxiety and test anxiety among the students by improving the teaching methodologies, to allow the schools to focus more on facilities that will assist students' learning and teacher's teachings, to give the opportunities for teachers to improve their teaching pedagogies and approaches in teaching English subject and last but not least to expose the suitable teaching methods and approaches in parallel with 4th Industrial Revolution for students in learning English subject. Also, it is hoped that there will be extended version of SCELa and be implemented in other subjects at school.