Abstract
The study explores the effects of teacher support and student cohesiveness on foreign language (FL) learning outcomes and compares their effect with that of FL anxiety. One hundred and forty-six first-year Chinese undergraduates of Japanese, who were also learning English, participated in two surveys that were administered over a 2-month interval. Data were collected using the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986), the Teacher Support Scale (Trickett & Moos, 2002), the Affiliation Scale (Trickett & Moos, 2002), the English Proficiency Scale, and the Japanese Proficiency Scale. It was found that (a) student cohesiveness was a positive predictor of FL proficiency, (b) teacher support, which was positively related to student cohesiveness and negatively to FL anxiety, did not show a direct relationship with FL proficiency, and (c) FL anxiety, which was negatively associated with FL proficiency, showed a better predictive power than student cohesiveness and teacher support.
Highlights
Understanding the factors affecting foreign language (FL) learning has been a crucial task in the field of SLA
The internal reliability of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) in Chinese was as high as other language versions used in previous studies that looked at university students, such as .94 in Aida (1994) and .95 in Zhao et al (2013)
This study has established an association of FL learning outcomes with teacher support as well as student cohesiveness in the classroom, with the latter
Summary
Understanding the factors affecting foreign language (FL) learning has been a crucial task in the field of SLA. Many studies have shown that the success and failure of FL learning are related to a myriad of internal and external learner variables as well as their interactions (e.g., Dewaele, 2007; Ellis, 2008) One such external factor is classroom environment, which itself is a multi-faceted concept (Trickett & Moos, 2002). Teacher support and student cohesiveness, as two key dimensions of classroom environment, have been directly shown to be essential for a fruitful FL learning experience, but only a fairly small number of studies currently exist. Their effects have not been related to FL anxiety, one well-recognized negative correlate of FL learning. We aimed to assess the roles of FL anxiety, teacher support, and student cohesiveness as general constructs, by collecting data over two contexts and time points
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