engleski

A Comparative Study of Foreign Language Anxiety among Students Majoring in French, Italian and Spanish

Although a phenomenon of foreign language anxiety has been a subject of a large number of studies, most research focused on learners with extrinsic motivation in foreign language learning and not on intrinsically motivated ones, such as university students majoring in foreign languages. It seems that this population is assumed to be highly motivated and free from foreign language anxiety. Also, in the literature there is a lack of comparative studies in FL anxiety among learners studying simultaneously two or more languages in the same socio- educational context. Results of recent research (Puškar, 2010) conducted with Croatian university students majoring in English and German shows higher levels of anxiety when using German. The researcher’s conclusion is that students consider English as the language of global communication, whereas German is perceived as a ‘real’ foreign language and therefore anxiety appears. In order to examine this hypothesis further, we have conducted a study with 150 university students (both undergraduate and graduate) majoring in so called ‘minor languages’, Italian, French and Spanish, at the same faculty. For this purpose it was decided to replicate the previous study using the same questionnaire and procedures of data collection, and using both quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. The aim of the present study is to explore the relationship between language anxiety and the language major, demographic characteristics of participants (age, gender, place of residence), length of learning a FL, language achievement, motivation, language exposure and classroom experience. The results indicate that FL anxiety is present even among intrinsically motivated students and that its levels depend on a number of above mentioned factors.

FL anxiety ; French ; Italian ; Spanish

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