Classroom Anxiety and Its Impact on English Language Learning: A Comparative Study Between School, College, and University Students

Abstract

Physical and mental anxiety create barriers in the development of English skills for pupils across educational stages. The investigation targets the effects of classroom anxiety on English proficiency skills of students across school education and college and university settings along with identifying how anxiety alters speaking and writing together with reading and listening abilities. Scientists have extensively studied language acquisition yet they still lack insight regarding specific classroom anxiety patterns during different educational levels as well as its concrete effect on student language output. The investigation relies on quantitative methods that utilize questionnaire data which combines FLCAS and self-reported language learning effects to measure classroom-related anxiety. Research analysis involved 100 student respondents in SPSS where SPSS developer tools evaluated differences in anxiety levels together with their relationship to English proficiency through descriptive statistics and ANOVA solutions followed by a regression analysis. Research data shows that negative correlations exist between language performance and classroom anxiety measurements (β = -0.45, p < 0.01) in which university students reported less anxiety than those at school and college levels. The skills of listening and speaking created the greatest anxiety levels that slowed down student progress in language acquisition. Educational institutions need to establish immediate measures that decrease anxiety according to this research data. The proposed solutions call for instruction-oriented training for teaching staff and educational structure alterations and mental care solutions for students to build supportive learning settings. This research expands current knowledge through its academic level-based classroom anxiety examination while offering direct solutions to decrease these effects. Researchers need to investigate more socio-cultural and personal factors which affect students' language anxiety while examining the efficacy of anxiety reduction methods in classroom environments.