Foreign Language Anxiety Study

With respect to the significant demographic variables, the finding that older students reported higher levels of foreign language anxiety is consistent with the positive relationship found between age and test anxiety (Crook, 1979; Hunt, 1989; Yesavage, Lapp, & Sheikh, 1989). The age/language anxiety relationship may have arisen because the ability to acquire mastery of the finer points of language, such as phonology and morphology, as well as the capacity to speak a second language without an accent severely deteriorate with age (Lieberman, 1984; Newport, 1986). According to some theorists, speed is a consequence, as opposed to a cause, of age-related declines in cognitive performance. Research has indicated that older individuals may perform more poorly than young adults on a variety of cognitive tasks in which a quick response is needed—as

Future research should investigate this relationship further. The finding that students who had not taken any high school foreign language had higher levels of foreign language anxiety than their more language-experienced counterparts suggests the importance of encouraging students to study a foreign language at the secondary school level. This finding, coupled with the age/anxiety relationship, indicates that foreign languages should be introduced as early as possible, perhaps even at the primary school level. There has, in fact, been an increase in the number of primary schools introducing foreign languages (Rosenbusch, 1995). Indeed, Black (1993) found that primary school children who pursue a foreign language tend to show more creativity, divergent thinking, and higher order thinking skills and to score higher on standardized achievement tests than those who do not.