A Study of the Relationship between L2 Learners’ Language Anxiety and Proficiency

This study examines the overall relationship between L2 anxiety and language proficiency in learners of Korean as a foreign language (KFL) and learners of English as a second language (ESL). It attempts to understand how differently the two language groups perceive L2 anxiety in the different language learning contexts with respect to learner variables such as gender, major, and school year. Twenty-nine KFL and nineteen ESL university students enrolled at a university completed Foreign Language Anxiety Scales and a background questionnaire. For research analyses, MANOVAs and ANOVAs were conducted to compare the two groups’ means on the dependent variables of overall anxiety and four types of anxiety such as speaking anxiety, low self-confidence, native speaker anxiety, and foreign language test anxiety. Results indicate that overall language anxiety was negatively correlated to language proficiency and observed as a distinctive variable across the two groups; the KFL group had higher overall anxiety than the ESL group. With respect to speaking anxiety, the ESL group had a significantly higher speaking anxiety score than the KFL group. ESL females, language/education, and freshmen groups showed significantly higher anxiety. For pedagogical implications, it is important that L2 educators create less threatening classroom environments with more stable interpersonal relationships by giving rather small, intimate collaborative group work than competitive individual tasks in class, especially for females, freshmen, and language major students in the second language context.