Investigating the Role of Anxiety on Online Learning among Iranian Intermediate and Upper-Intermediate EFL Learners

This study investigates the role of anxiety on online learning among Iranian intermediate and upper-intermediate EFL learners. 80 students from different schools between the ages of 8 to 15 years and with an intermediate and upper-intermediate level of proficiency, and 40 teachers of different genders within the age group of 25 to 35 years participated in this study. All of the participants were Persian native speakers and joined the online classes three times a week. They were all informed about the causes and types of anxiety that students experienced in online classes through the questionnaire entries, which were both adopted from the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLACS) developed by Horwitz et al. (1986) and The Foreign Language Virtual Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLVCAS) developed by Kaisar and Chowdhury (2020) that the researcher used. A series of statistical analyses such as descriptive statistics and Correlation and ANOVA tests were run through SPSS Software (version 22) to analyze the obtained data. The study results showed that by considering the average level of learning anxiety through online education (2.84), this variable was less than the theoretical average of  3 and indicated that the level of learning anxiety through online education was low. Finally, the current research findings could benefit everyone involved in English as a foreign language teaching and learning process, including syllabus designers, foreign language teachers, and administrators.