Foreign language anxiety (or xenoglossophobia) is the feeling of unease, worry, nervousness and apprehension experienced when learning or using a second or foreign language. These feelings may stem from any second language context whether associated with the productive skills of speaking and writing, or the receptive skills of reading and listening.
Foreign language anxiety is a form of what psychologists describe as a specific anxiety reaction. Some individuals are more predisposed to anxiety than others, and may feel anxious in a wide variety of situations. Foreign language anxiety, however, is situation-specific and so can also affect individuals who are not characteristically anxious in other situations.
Causes of foreign language anxiety
Although all aspects of using and learning a foreign language can cause anxiety, listening and speaking are regularly cited as the most anxiety provoking of foreign language activities. Foreign language anxiety is usually studied and seen in a language classroom situation. Three theories of anxiety have been developed from internal appraisal, then more situational in learning language, and to contextual situation:
- self-efficacy and appraisal anxiety
- state, trait, situational anxiety
- situational anxiety in a classroom situation
Potential negative events that people cannot see or handle with their ability often leads to anxiety. But also, if individuals are highly anxious, this kind of habitualised reactions made those who have experienced many threatening situations in the past more likely perceive future situations as threatening. In addition to this, if their anxiety are traits rather than states, self-efficacy must result from past successes, vicarious experiences, and social persuasion.
Self-efficacy is one’s own confidence that he or she would be able to handle to achieve intended goals. State, trait, situational anxiety refers to those who have gotten traumatised a lot in the past are more likely to perceive the future situations as treating too. In addition to this, specifically in ESL classroom, students learning a foreign language out of their country are very vulnerable to high levels of anxiety about language learning, which leads them to being less likely to get encouraged by others because of lacking vicarious experience and social persuasions.
More specifically, foreign language anxiety is seen in a language classroom. As such, the causes of foreign language anxiety have been broadly separated into three main components: communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. Communication apprehension is the anxiety experienced when speaking to or listening to other individuals. Test-anxiety is a form of performance anxiety associated with the fear of doing badly, or indeed failing altogether. Fear of negative evaluation is the anxiety associated with the learner's perception of how other onlookers (instructors, classmates or others) may negatively view their language ability.
Sparks and Ganschow asked a question which drew attention to the fact that anxiety could either be a cause of poor language learning or a result of poor language learning. If a student is unable to study as required before writing a language examination, the student could experience test anxiety. In this context anxiety could be viewed as a result. In contrast, anxiety becomes a cause of poor language learning when due to anxiety that student is unable to adequately learn the target language.
There can be various physical causes of anxiety (such as hormone levels) but the underlying causes of excessive anxiety whilst learning are fear and a lack of confidence. Lack of confidence itself can come from various causes. One reason can be the teaching approach used.
Furthermore, foreign language anxiety roots in three psychological challenges:
- performance difficulty
- threat
- identity conflict
Those psychological states thus have task-performance and identity dimensions. People tend to act or speak in a way that would be judged appropriate to the other people native to the foreign culture, whereas the behaviour individuals are producing grapples with ingrained values and behaviours. Emotions by these psychological challenges has something to do with attempting to switch codes in an interactive encounter.
Effects of foreign language anxiety
The effects of foreign language anxiety are particularly evident in the foreign language classroom, and anxiety is a strong indicator of academic performance. Anxiety is found to have a detrimental effect on students' confidence, self-esteem and level of participation.
Anxious learners suffer from mental blocks during spontaneous speaking activities, lack confidence, are less able to self-edit and identify language errors, and are more likely to employ avoidance strategies such as skipping class. Anxious students also forget previously learned material, volunteer answers less frequently and tend to be more passive in classroom activities than their less anxious counterparts.
The effects of foreign language anxiety also extend outside the second language classroom. A high level of foreign language anxiety may also correspond with communication apprehension, causing individuals to be quieter and less willing to communicate. People who exhibit this kind of communication reticence can also sometimes be perceived as less trustworthy, less competent, less socially and physically attractive, tenser, less composed and less dominant than their less reticent counterparts.
Cross-cultural code-switching
The effects caused by these negative emotions also possibly lead to cross-cultural code-switching, where bilinguals alter a language to the other language of theirs through the interactions with other bilinguals. Since this is culturally affected and differentiated from linguistic code-switching, in that cross-cultural code-switching is a sociolinguistic phenomena that describes the act of changing culturally ingrained behaviours in a foreign situation. Although this cross-cultural code-switching possibly results from both positive and negative emotions, negative emotions are more common and easier to affect the way a bilingual speaks. Negative emotions include; embarrassment, performance anxiety, guilt, distress, anxiety. This cross-cultural code-switching in sorted into three possibilities:
- situational code-switching
- conversational code-switching
- borrowing
The code-switching could be considered as an unconscious behaviour due to its negative and usually threatening situations. In this sense, although code-switching results from foreign language anxiety, it is more originally caused by external circumstances rather than internal mental change.
Measures of foreign language anxiety
A number of tools have been developed to investigate the level of foreign language anxiety experienced by language learners.
The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) is a 33 question, 5 point Likert scale survey which is widely used in research studies. The measure investigates participants' communication apprehension, test-anxiety and fear of negative evaluation; and focuses on speaking in a classroom context. The instrument has been translated and used in several languages including Spanish and Chinese.
Following the success of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety scale, similar instruments have been devised for measuring Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRAS), Foreign Language Listening Anxiety (FLLAS) and Second Language Writing Apprehension (SLWAT).
Issues and area of research
In the nineties, it was challenging to clearly categorise grammatical constraints or socio-linguistic constraints on code-switching cased by foreign language anxiety, and to determine how bilinguals produce different code-mixed patterns. In fact, previously, most researches focused more upon syntactic aspects on code-switching; in other words, psychological elements were completely ignored.
References
- Lin, G. H. C. (2009). "An exploration into foreign language writing anxiety from Taiwanese university students’ perspectives" (PDF). National Changhua University of Education, Department of English, Taiwan, ROC,: 307â€"318.Â
- Lin, G. H. C. (2008). "Pedagogies proving Krashen’s theory of affective filter" (PDF). Hwa Kang Journal of English Language & Literature. 14: 113â€"131. ERIC Collection as ED503681.Â
