Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety

The problem of foreign language classroom anxiety

Language anxiety is one of the affective variables that have been traditionally considered as a matter of concern in communicative classrooms. For foreign language learners, it’s very common to experience feeling of apprehension about communicating in language that it’s not their own native language. When student experience foreign language anxiety in the class, they can easily can be afraid to speak the foreign language in the front of other students and in the front of the teacher. This is the problem that can hinder the attainment of two common aims of communicative classrooms: the use of the target language as a regular instrument of communication in the language classroom and, ultimately,

At first sight, there are certain circumstances surrounding the language learning experience that can make foreign language learning in a classroom context specially challenging, if not daunting, for the learners. On the one hand, students often get involved in a learning experience in which the knowledge of the object of study as an instrument to communicate in less than ideal conditions, that is, in front of a teacher who is always ready to correct and/or feeling observed or evaluate at the same time by a large number of

Firstly, feeling of incompetence or of not having enough skills or knowledge to cope with classroom demands can also be found when trying to learn other subjects, for instance in math anxiety. Secondly, communicative interactions in the foreign language are likely to trigger the same feelings of social or interpersonal anxiety that characterize general communication apprehension in the native language. Thirdly, fears about being on the spot of feeling observed are connatural to experience of state flight. Last, but not least, communication events where his/her competence is being tested, which can make foreign language classroom anxiety similar to test anxiety for some extent.

Comparing foreign language classroom anxiety to those other anxiety processes wouldn’t be possible without considering a common component that seems to be in the root of all of them, namely fear of negative evaluation. In fact, the possibility of finding similarities between foreign language anxiety and other type of anxiety, suggest that the foreign language classroom context probably presents a variety of factors that can be anxiety-including and that interact together making the fear of negative evaluation especially common and intense language