The Effect of Foreign Language
Anxiety On Second Language
Achievement in the Classroom
"Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety"
This project aims to define foreign language anxiety and moves to characterize anxiety’s effect upon a student’s learning of a second language in the classroom environment. The journal explains that foreign language anxiety is a unique type of specific anxiety that is limited to language learning. Horwitz, et al. analyses previous second language studies that establish connections between anxiety and communicative language learning. The authors demonstrate the specific symptoms and responses that anxious students experience in the foreign language classroom. “Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety” identifies foreign language anxiety through its own development and implementation of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale. Through the study, the authors suggest that foreign language anxiety greatly affects speaking and listening skills. “Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety” states that this form of anxiety has three characteristics: a fear of communicating in the target language, test anxiety, and likelihood of pessimistic judgment by others (127).
The source’s project and aim in the introduction closely resemble my sense of the author’s work throughout. The authors note in their introduction that the aim in this study was to distinguish foreign language anxiety in the field of foreign language learning. In the introduction, they included their endeavor to align the link between foreign language anxiety and second language learning with previous critical second language studies. This summary communicates that this source established the evidence to prove that foreign language anxiety is a distinct form of anxiety. My summary highlights the authors’ aim to validate the proposal that anxiety has effects on language learning and on the students through their analysis of other established studies.