The role of Language Anxiety in Foreign Language Learning

Abstract

The present research study is an attempt to investigate the topic of language anxiety in the context of foreign language learning. The study is divided into two parts corresponding to the different research questions exposed. In the first part of the study we try to find evidence of the existence or not of language anxiety and more specifically foreign language communication apprehension among students of Compulsory Secondary Education( CSE) studying English as their L2 and in that case, the English activities which generate high levels of anxiety. In the second part of our research study, we go further in this field by investigating whether or not multilingualism can reduce students’ foreign language anxiety. In this way, we compare the outcomes of both research experiments with the aim of finding differences in the level of foreign language anxiety (FLA) between bilingual and quadrilingual students in English as their foreign language. The material used in both parts is a questionnaire adapted from the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) of Horwitz et al. (1986).The participants of the first part of the study are 122 Spanish speaking students enrolled in their CSE English classes and the participants of the second part are 65 multilingual students having Catalan as their mother tongue, Spanish as their L2 and they are enrolled in their CSE English and French language classes. The results obtained from the first research experiment suggest the existence of language anxiety among EFL students but in a moderate level because there has been no evidence of a great number of high-anxious students. Moreover, the findings reveal that the most anxiety-provoking skill is that of speaking. The outcomes of the second research experiment show that although the data reveal that quadrilingual students FLA levels are lower than those of the bilingual students, we cannot conclude that multilingualism reduces foreign language anxiety since the outcomes do not show great differences between both groups.