Language Anxiety Research

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. Research on language anxiety is not new. Young (1999a) stated that since the 1990s, researchers and theorists have focused on language anxiety in foreign or second language settings. According to MacIntyre (1999),“there is not much empirical research on the origins of language anxiety” (p. 30), though some studies have been done in the areas of psychology and communication that relate to language anxiety. Thus, research in this area is quite new; in addition, there are many problems with the field so far MacIntyre (1999) examined the previous literature on language anxiety. He observed that the data in much of this research had been gained through questionnaire, self-reports, and interviews (ibid). Many of these studies had …show more content…

The studies seem to confirm that LA is a feeling that may be associated oral performance or target language. In her study Liu (2006) finds that 547 first year undergraduate students learners of English in China experienced anxiety when giving oral presentations in class. In Philips’ (1992) study, it is discovered that there is a negative correlation between LA and oral performance and that students who receive lower exam grades then to feel more anxious that their counterparts.
Kitano (2001) studied anxiety in the college Japanese classroom. The specific purpose of the study was to investigate two potential sources of the anxiety of college learners of Japanese in oral practice. It is concluded that an individual student’s anxiety was higher he or she perceived his or her ability as lower than that of peers and native speaker.
Based on the findings above it is obvious that language anxiety does influence language learning indirect or directly. There are various sources that trigger language anxiety among the second or foreign language students. These sources should be minimized to ensure students can learn better in foreign language classroom.
(highlighting the reasons for and against an argument if they exist, and identify gaps and …show more content…

Chau’s (1999) research conducted in Hong Kong shows one-third of the respondents negatively evaluated roles of language teachers. When a teacher keeps asking students to guess the answer of a question, in students’ perception, he/ she is actually punishing the students by asking them to stand up in the class. Thus, there should be a communication between teachers and students about their teaching and learning styles. Teachers should act as facilitators. They give guidance and support to language learning, and emphasis should be put on the communicate functions of the language, instead of spotting grammatical mistakes

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