Levels of Language Anxiety Relative to Proficiency Levels

Levels of Language Anxiety Relative to Proficiency Levels

Researchers in SLA have long recognized the negative effect of anxiety on language learning and revealed a consistent correlation between student anxiety and proficiency level. This paper investigates the correlation in the context of EFL in Korea, in order to examine whether Korean EFL learners also show different anxiety scales relative to proficiency levels. A total of 819 university-level learners completed a questionnaire measuring foreign language anxiety (the RELAXT). The data indicated that the anxiety scores were significantly different between different proficiency levels, with regard to all of the four factors of foreign language anxiety (speaking anxiety, low self-confidence on foreign language ability, native speaker anxiety, and foreign language test anxiety), as well as overall anxiety. This result provides evidence of a relationship between Korean EFL learners' proficiency levels and their foreign language anxiety scales: anxiety decreases as proficiency level increases.