Roots of language classroom anxiety Annotated Bibliography - Laurencsik

Roots of language classroom anxiety

Annotated Bibliography

Multiculturalism, globalization and international relationships are everyday phenomena these days; people need to speak foreign languages including at least the current lingua franca, English to be able to communicate and to keep in touch with our modern society. In my investigation I would like to find the roots of a very common but sadly often underestimated occurrence in language classrooms, which is language anxiety. I would like to find those factors and environments which contribute to the appearance of this phenomenon, as quite large numbers of learners are hampered by classroom anxiety. Teachers need to be aware of and detect the problem, and they also need to facilitate the reduction of anxiety in order to make language learning easier and more effective, which is becoming more and more important these days.

Pappamihiel,N.  E. (2002). English as a Second Language Students and English Language Anxiety: Issues in the Mainstream Classroom. Research in the Teaching of English, 36(3), 327-355.

The study and the article are concerned with language classroom anxiety experienced by non-native speakers of English. The subjects of the study were of Mexican origin, chosen from high schools of Texas, USA. The study tries to identify the factors and circumstances that contribute to the development of classroom anxiety and to classify and differentiate between the types and levels of the phenomenon that interferes negatively with the language learning experience. Also lists the coping strategies the focus groups of the subjects shared with the researchers.

The article gave a very detailed explanation of anxiety, which is a very complex problem. First of all there seems to be a difference between the anxiety which is experienced by the students in ESL classrooms and in mainstream classrooms where the mediator language was English. In the first case the anxiety is related to academic achievement, while the latter is in connection with social and cultural factors (like the strained relationship between Mexican-born students and American born ‘Chicanos’). Basically foreign language anxiety can be attributed to the fear of negative evaluation, text anxiety and communication apprehension. When an individual’s sense of self-efficacy is low, the person is very likely to interpret situations where the use of the foreign language will be required as threatening to his or her identity, fearing that coping with the problem is far beyond his or her abilities. This fear divides the attention, thus makes it harder to complete tasks in a foreign language as students are pre-occupied with their fears.

Hewitt, E., & Stephenson, J. (2012). Foreign Language Anxiety and Oral Exam Performance: A Replication of Phillips's MLJ Study. The Modern Language Journal, 96(2), 170-189.

The article is based on the replication of Philips’s study, which examines the relationship between foreign language anxiety and oral performance in exam situations. The new research confirmed the results of the first study. The article differentiates between facilitating and debilitating foreign language anxiety, though the latter one is the major concern of the research. The subjects in this case were university students learning their second language and data were collected both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Though the article basically concentrates on how foreign language anxiety influences the performance in oral exam situations, and mostly elaborates on the methods and the subjects of the data collection, in the first part it gives a handy list of what could be the potential triggering factors of foreign language anxiety. Among the possible causes are the; unfavourable comparison of one’s own language performance to that of others, student’s relationship with the language instructor, poor self-esteem, and the belief or assumption that accent and performance must be perfect on exams. It is also shown that oral tasks are more likely to cause anxiety compared to writing tasks.

Ganschow, L., & Sparks, R. (1996). Anxiety about Foreign Language Learning among High School Women. The Modern Language Journal, 80(2), 199-212.

The article shortly presents some of the previously conducted studies, and identifies the lack of attention towards native language skills in connection with foreign language anxiety. The basic assumption of the study, that is, a person’s native language skills and foreign language aptitude has an influence on foreign language anxiety, has been confirmed. The subjects for the study were chosen from a highly selective preparatory high school for women, all of them were in their first year. The subjects were divided into three different groups identified as low-anxiety, average-anxiety and high-anxiety. The connection between their skills in their mother tongue and foreign language aptitude were examined considering pillars phonology/orthography, semantics, verbal memory, and reading comprehension, etc.

The research found a connection between native language skills, foreign language aptitude and foreign language anxiety, the former two being a good predictor of the level of foreign language anxiety, though the relationship is not entirely straightforward. However, the classification of subjects was not completely correct based on the FLCAS (Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale); furthermore, some of the subjects who were correctly classified in the high-anxiety group were very successful, while some low-anxiety subjects had a poorer performance.