Language Teaching Anxiety and Personal Intelligences: Pre-service versus In-service EFL Teachers

English language teaching is considered as an anxiety-provoking profession for the novice members of the teaching community. Indeed, their perceptions and practices might be influenced by this variable. Despite the full attention allocated to the English learners’ anxiety, teachers’ anxiety seems to have remained untouched. The current study attempted to explore the pre-service and in-service English teachers’ language teaching anxiety to see whether these two groups differed in terms of this trait. The study further aimed to investigate the possible relationship between pre-service and in-service English teachers’ interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences and their language teaching anxiety. To this end, a convenient sample of 120 pre-service and 120 in-service English teachers were asked to complete Capel’s Teaching Anxiety Scale and answer the relevant items from McKenzie’s Multiple Intelligences Questionnaire. The results of descriptive statistical analysis indicated the participants’ seemingly high level of teaching anxiety. The analysis further demonstrated the significant negative correlation between the participants’ interpersonal intelligence and their language teaching anxiety while no significant link was found between their intrapersonal intelligence and anxiety level. Moreover, the results of the independent samples t-test revealed a significant difference between pre-service and in-service English teachers in terms of their language teaching anxiety. The findings pointed to the necessity of informed educational actions to lower pre-service teachers’ teaching anxiety and breed a more strategic generation of English teachers who are empowered to rise to the challenges in their teaching profession in order to achieve more desired outcomes.