Anxiety In Second Language Learning Essay

Anxiety serves as a most important factor that affects learner’s ability. The role of anxiety in educational success emerged as a significant area of study after the mid-twentieth century. The phenomenon of anxiety has been widely recognized as one of the most important psychological phenomena that is experienced in many social or learning contexts and relates to fear, unpleasant, and worries.

More and more attention has been drawn to the individual learner’s performance since 1970s. The learning that takes place within each individual can be attributed to their cognitive and affective sides of language learning. However many researches gave attention to cognitive aspects of the learner means leaning any language is a cognitive activity, it is purely formed by accepting the new words, storing them in minds translating them

There is only little attention being paid to the emotional or affective variables learners bring with them in language classroom. . It was only in late twentieth century, in the 1970s, that the SLA researchers began to study the significant role played by personally and motivational variables in second language acquisition With the advent of communicative language teaching in the mid twentieth century learners ability of communicating in the target language was emphasized but it came to known that learners are challenged to speak in various social context. In order to meet this challenge, attention has diverted to studying the role of affective variables like learning styles’ motivation, personality traits, etc. that can hinder the process of learning and speaking a second/foreign language. Among these affective variables, learner anxiety has come to be recognized as an important area of study in second language acquisition because of the negative influence it can have on students’