Anxiety and Second‐Language Learning: Toward a Theoretical Clarification*

TLDR

Foreign‑language anxiety research is marked by conflicting findings that create ambiguity. The study aims to resolve this ambiguity by showing that anxiety rooted in the language environment predicts learning, and by proposing a developmental model of foreign‑language anxiety. The authors factor‑analysed eleven anxiety scales to derive General and Communicative Anxiety dimensions, then tested predictions linking communicative anxiety to learning and proposed a developmental model. Foreign‑language anxiety and state anxiety scales correlated with performance, but only the communicative anxiety dimension predicted both acquisition and production of French vocabulary, while other anxiety types showed no consistent relationships.

Abstract

Reviews of the literature on foreign‐language anxiety show a considerable amount of ambiguity arising from the conflicting results of past studies. This study attempts to show that these difficulties can be resolved given an awareness of the theoretical perspective from which this research has developed. Specifically, it was predicted that anxiety based in the language environment would be associated with language learning whereas other types of anxiety would not show consistent relationships to performance. Eleven anxiety scales were factor analyzed yielding two orthogonal dimensions of anxiety which were labelled General Anxiety and Communicative Anxiety. It was found that only Communicative Anxiety is a factor in both the acquisition and production of French vocabulary. Analyses of the correlations between the anxiety scales and the measures of achievement show that scales of foreign‐language anxiety and state anxiety are associated with performance. Scales of test anxiety, audience sensitivity, trait anxiety, and other types of anxiety did not correlate with any of the production measures. Finally, a model is proposed which describes the development of foreign‐language anxiety.