Foreign Language Anxiety and Its Effect on Female College Students - Literature review Example

Anxiety associated with language learning for the past three decades is second simply to aptitude as an associate of foreign language achievement. Anxiety might be an enduring trait of personality, a response to a particular set of situations, or a blend of the two, as a person responsible for anxiety faces a situation that causes it.According to Stevick, (1978), a reluctance to speak for fear of making a mistake may have an effect on pessimistically both the learning of a language in the classroom situation (Scovel, 1978) and its performance in any situation (Krashen, 1981).

The anxiety of language learning is not at all times negative, Number range CHAPTER just as a player or an examinee may perform better with the adrenalin pumping, so a peculiarity is at times made between facilitating and debilitating anxiety (Brown, 1987).After these studies, much has been written about students' anxiety and uncertainty while studying a foreign language (Bailey 1983; Horwitz 1988; Horwitz and Young 1991; Scovel 1991), much less is known about the role anxiety and uncertainty play in a teacher's performance.

Basically, Anxiety can be either a state or a permanent trait of fear or apprehension (Horwitz and Young 1991). With debilitating anxiety, motivation suffers, poor performance occurs, and still greater anxiety is aroused, but facilitating anxiety stimulates the learner to try harder and perform better. Certain language activities, such as speaking in front of others or writing a paper, can generate anxiety about performance. Other anxiety-causing variables are certain classroom structures, perceived irrelevance of the target language, and culture shock.

Language anxiety can be reduced through relaxation, humor, discussion, support groups, and other means (Young 1998).The majority of the literature dealt with debilitating anxiety and proposed a bidirectional negative relationship between anxiety and linguistic performance. Numerous students go through a descending spiral in which the understanding of their cognitive problems obvious with slower and ineffective performance shows the way to greater anxiety which further hinders cognition (Young, 1991).