Is Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Context Free or Context Dependent?

Abstract

In his response letter to my study Questioning the Stability of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety and Motivation Across Different Classroom Contexts (Kim, 2009), Rodriguez criticized my argument for affect variability for being drawn from differences in instructional contexts rather than two different target languages, the approach taken by Rodriguez and Abreu's (2003) study. He also argued that I should have administered the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS; Saito, Horwitz, & Garza, 1999) rather than the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS; Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986) in the reading course in my study. Finally, he suggested that I should provide more detailed information about the statistical analyses. While his claims are engaging, they seem to take a focus away from the main point proposed in Kim (2009). The central point in this debate is whether foreign language anxiety is stable or not. Kim (2009) was not a replication of Rodriguez and Abreu's (2003) study, which focused on the stability of anxiety across two target languages. Rather it was an attempt to see if their stability thesis would stand when different variables such as instructional contexts were included. If anxiety is not stable across different instructional contexts, then the attempt to examine the stability of anxiety across different target languages should be questioned. The different effects of instructional contexts shown in Kim (2009) demonstrate that learner affect is not a fixed or stable trait but susceptible to change according to contextual variables. Other studies have also reported that contextual variables (i.e., learning activities and classroom climate) yield different levels of anxiety (Koch & Terrell, 1991; Madsen, Brown, & Jones, 1991; Palacios, 1998; Young, 1990). In contrast, Rodriguez and Abreu's (2003) study disregarded contextual factors, such as curricular goals, instructional approaches, classroom activities, and testing. Therefore, their finding that foreign language anxiety was stable across English and French cannot be generalized to other groups of students learning the same target languages. Other groups of learners in different instructional or cultural contexts may experience different levels of anxiety in learning English and French. Note also that the participants in Rodriguez and Abreu (2003) were a group of pre-service foreign language teachers who were highly motivated to learn their target languages. Because of the distinctive nature of the group, the stability argument drawn from the study is harder to generalize to other foreign language settings. In his response to my article, however, Rodriguez seems to imply that their study had attended to contextual differences, stating while our participants were from two colleges 200 miles apart and were learning two different foreign languages, hers were from the same college and were taking two courses in the same foreign language. Rodriguez's definition of contextual differences seems to be based on physical distance. We should, however, beware of the possibility that Rodriguez and Abreu's participants, although being 200 miles apart, were bound by the same educational systems and cultural norms. My point here is that only when participant factors are controlled statistically, can we propose a general thesis like the stability argument. The reason why Kim (2009) attempted to examine the effect of specific instructional contexts is that these elements were taken for granted in Rodriguez and Abreu (2003). In addition to the effect of classroom contexts, my study supports earlier findings that foreign language anxiety might vary in different cultural groups (Horwitz, 2001; Koch & Terrell, 1991; Kunt, 1997; Truitt, 1995). Rodriguez also criticized the research method on the grounds that the FLRAS should have been used for the reading course in my study. The FLRAS is designed to measure foreign language reading anxiety, whereas the FLCAS measures anxiety specific to foreign language learning experience in classroom settings, such as communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test anxiety. …