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Students' voices on foreign language anxiety.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This paper discusses two anxious learners' perceptions of themselves in Japanese class: fear of miscommunication, fear of failure, and ideal learners vs. themselves, which often led them to feel inferior. This paper suggests the importance to consider learners holistically.

Introduction

The Japanese language has become the fifth most commonly taught language since 1990 (Survey of Foreign Language Registrations in U.S. Institutions of Higher Education, cited in Samimy 1994, Samimy and Tabuse 1992). However, the attrition rate of students who take Japanese classes has become "as much as eighty percent" (Mills, Samuels, & Sherwood, 1987, cited in Samimy 1994). Samimy maintains that one of the reasons contributing to a high attrition rate would be the "degree of difficulty of the Japanese language itself" (ibid: 29). According to the United States Foreign Service Institute, Japanese is categorized in Group IV, the most difficult languages to master. Because of its level of difficulty, the Japanese language can be expected to trigger learners' FL anxiety (Samimy 1994: 29). Some researchers claim that this FL anxiety hinders students' success in class (Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope 1986, MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991, 1995). MacIntyre and Gardner (1995) assert that FL anxiety interferes with learners' short-term and long-term memories (P.93). Although previous research considered all of the participants as one entity without capturing individual characteristics, few studies have tuned into the students' actual voices on FL anxiety issues. It is important to explore these issues from the learners' perceptions of their social identity: how they view and categorize themselves and others based on their linguistic and cultural characteristics.

Literature on Foreign Language Anxiety

In their study of FL anxiety, Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986) find that students who have FL anxiety are ubiquitous. The authors identify three contributing factors to FL anxiety: 1) communication apprehension, which indicates when a person has difficulty listening or speaking a FL in front of people; 2) test anxiety, which is a level of nervousness during test-taking that causes students to answer wrongly even though they know the correct answer; and 3) fear of negative evaluation, which is worry about how others, peers and teachers, assess one's performance. My question concerns where these fears originate. Horwitz et al. suggest that adult learners' FL anxiety derives from "the disparity between the language learner's 'true-self and his/her 'more limited self' as reflected in linguistic competence in FL class (1986: 128). McIntyre and Gardner's (1991, 1995) research also suggests that anxiety interferes with the learners' cognitive processing of the second language (L2). But does this dichotomization fully explain the fear of all FL anxious students?

Literature on Social Identity Theory

Instead of dichotomization, there is a need to consider learners as a whole and...

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