Foreign Language Learning Anxiety: The Case of Iranian Kurdish-Persian Bilinguals

ABSTRACT:As arecognized psychological construct, anxietyplays aninfluential role in the invaluable experience of learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). This affective factor has appealed lots of researchersinto examination of anxiety levels and severityin a wide variety of academic and non-academic contexts since the last three decades; however there are several unexplored EFL settings overlooked in this stream particularly in Iran. To this end, keeping to previous studies, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS; Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope, 1986)was administered to a randomly screened-out sample (No. 191) of Iranian bilingual Kurdish-Persiannon-English-major undergraduate students at a technical college in Ilam, Iran. The findings of this preliminary unique study revealed that these bilinguals learning English as their third language indeed experienced a comparatively high level of foreign language learning anxietyin the forms of communication anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety, and anxiety in the EFL classroom environment.At the end, suggestions to lessen language learning anxiety in EFL settings and implications for further studies were delineated.