The link between foreign language classroom anxiety and psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism among adult Bi‐ and multilinguals

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe present study focuses on the link between three global personality traits (Psychoticism, Extraversion, and Neuroticism), one sociobiographical factor (knowledge of languages), and levels of foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA; Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986) in the second (L2), third (L3), and fourth (L4) language of two groups of adult language learners and users. The first group consisted of 86 students who were enrolled at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the second group consisted of 62 students from University of Les Illes Balears in Mallorca, Spain. The main aim was to examine whether, as is generally reported in the Second Language Acquisition literature, FLCA is unrelated to a basic personality trait reflecting anxiety (Neuroticism). Contrary to other findings in the field, correlation analyses revealed a significant link between Neuroticism and FLCA in the foreign languages of both groups, sharing between 9% and 25% of variance. Moderately significant relationships were found among Psychoticism, Extraversion, and FLCA in one group only. Language knowledge had an effect on FLCA in some languages. Strong correlations between FLCA values in L2, L3, and L4 suggest that levels of FLCA are relatively stable across the foreign languages known by the learners/users.