An Empirical Study on Chinese University Students’ English Language Classroom Anxiety With the Idiodynamic Approach

Xiang He,Dandan Zhou,Xiaofei Zhang

doi:10.1177/21582440211037676

Abstract

Foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) is a very critical affective factor for learners’ language learning and development. The present study was designed to explore the features of Chinese university students’ FLCA and to investigate the possible influencing factors on the fluctuations of Chinese university students’ FLCA. Two female and two male Chinese university students were selected as the participants and their in-class performances were recorded. Data collection instrument included the classroom observation, the self-rated evaluation of FLCA, and the stimulated recall interview. To capture the micro-changes of the Chinese learners’ FLCA per second, an idiodynamic approach was adopted to carry out the exploratory analysis for the learners’ experiences of FLCA over the language instruction. Zooming in on the microdynamic variation of the participants’ FLCA, the final results indicated that Chinese university students’ FLCA, both within individuals and across individuals, is characterized of a dynamic system’s features. Furthermore, a series of contributing factors were identified to trigger the participants’ FLCA, with the classroom activity types and the teacher’s feedback being the key external factors and the gender difference and self-efficacy being the major internal factors. The idiodynamic method shed new light on exploring the FLCA from an emic and dynamic perspective and some pedagogical implications were also put forward as well.

Highlights

Anxiety is one of the critical individual affective factors in the process of learning a second language or a foreign language
Foreign language classroom is a special ecological situation consisting of various ingredients, and all the things learners encounter during the process within the classroom ecosystem may exert subtle impacts on the foreign language instruction, resulting in the trigger of language learners’ anxiety and causing the fluctuations of learners’ foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA)
The video clips were shown to the individual participants to help them to recall the situations where their the instant FLCA were triggered and the sources behind these changes were claimed with the participants’ self-explanations in the stimulated recall interview

Summary

Introduction

Anxiety is one of the critical individual affective factors in the process of learning a second language or a foreign language. Researchers and scholars have carried out mountains of studies to explore the language anxiety in a second or a foreign language learning process from various perspectives, like the overall description of learners’ foreign language anxiety (FLA; Gardner & MacIntyre, 2010; Horwitz et al, 1986), the correlation between learner’s FLA and the individual language achievement (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1989; Saito & Samimy, 1996), and the possible causes of L2 learners’ FLA and suggested countermeasures and so on (Koch & Terrell, 1991; Price, 1991; Young, 1991) The majority of these previous FLA studies have generally examined the learners’ FLA by conducting the experimental studies or questionnaire survey from an etic perspective, yet the static quantitative analysis can only provide quite limited explanations for the FLA changes L2 learners might go through given the dynamic features of FLA.

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion