This study aims to look into the debate anxiety of academic purpose Korean language learners and suggest ways to assist their debate performance. To achieve its purpose, 44 academic purpose Korean language learners participated in a questionnaire on debate anxiety and perceived obstacles of debate performance. Correlation analysis results revealed that perceived obstacles of debate performance had a significant positive relationship with only cognitive debate anxiety. Next, the participants were divided in two groups consisting of those with high debate anxiety and low debate anxiety. Independent t-tests were performed on each item of perceived obstacles of debate performance inventory. As a result, those with high levels of debate anxiety had a significant difference on 6 items in total: difficulty on understanding others due to vocabulary and grammar issues, obtaining background knowledge related to the topic, providing a reasonable basis for my argument, searching for supportive data that backs up my arguments, challenging the opponent’s argument, and attentively responding to the opponents’ words. Implications and suggestions for practice are discussed.