Relationship between Teaching Styles and EFL Students' Anxiety

Many qualitative studies in SLA have investigated what causes foreign language anxiety. this study specifically examines teaching styles as a source of student anxiety using a quantitative method. A total of 150 Korean EFL learners, who were considered to be moderately low-level, completed a questionnaire measuring student anxiety. Students taught by a strict instructor reported significantly higher anxiety scales than taught by a generous instructor, in all of the four factors, speaking anxiety, low self-confidence, native speaker anxiety, and test anxiety, as well as overall anxiety. the results of t-tests for independent samples provided evidence that there was a relationship between teaching styles and student anxiety: the stricter an instructor was, the higher the student anxiety was. In addition, this study found significant negative correlation between student anxiety and grades. These results indicate that EFL teachers should be generous to their students as much as possible, especially to low-level students, in order to alleviate student anxiety.