The impact of gender on foreign language speaking anxiety and motivation

This study investigates the effect of gender on foreign language speaking anxiety and learner motivation. 225 female and 158 male pre-intermediate students participated in the study. Two questionnaires were administered to the participants, and randomly selected 19 students were also interviewed. According to the results of the quantitative data, female students demonstrated a higher level of foreign language learning motivation than male students. The results also showed that the female students get more anxious than the male students while speaking in English in classroom. The results of the qualitative data showed parallelism with the quantitative results. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of ALSC 2012