Anxiety and the True Beginner-False Beginner Dynamic in Beginning French and Spanish Classes

Abstract

This study considered true beginners and false beginners in first‐semester university French and Spanish classes to: (a) determine whether true beginners and false beginners differ in anxiety, grades, and plans to continue language study; and (b) identify classroom factors that foster anxiety or comfort. Students completed a questionnaire that included the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986), MacIntyre and Gardner Anxiety Subscales (1989, 1994), demographic information, grade expectations, and open‐ended questions. Randomly selected students were interviewed about their experiences in the courses. Statistical analyses revealed that (a) although neither group was terribly anxious, true beginners were significantly more anxious overall and during processing and output stages than false beginners; (b) true beginners expected and received lower grades than false beginners; and (c) significantly more true beginners than false beginners planned to continue studying the language. Comments on one written open‐ended question and in the interviews pointed to the key role of the instructor in reducing anxiety.

An Investigation of Chinese University Students’ Foreign Language Anxiety and English Learning Motivation

“…Since then, research has been flourishing in this area using the scale as the principal data-collection instrument, agreeing on the existence of anxiety in SL/FL classrooms (Ewald, 2007;Kessler, 2010;Tallon, 2009;Yan & Horwitz, 2008). Though some studies report that anxiety can be facilitating (Frantzen & Magnan, 2005;Gregersen, 2003;Gregersen & Horwitz, 2002;Spielmann & Radnofsky, 2001), findings of most studies have been relatively uniform, indicating a consistently moderate negative relationship between anxiety and SL/FL proficiency/performance (Ewald, 2007;Horwitz, 2001;Liu, 2006b;Liu & Jackson, 2008;Matsuda & Gobel, 2004;Mills, Pajare, & Herron, 2006). For example, Liu and Jackson's (2008) study of 547 Chinese university freshmen revealed that foreign language anxiety was inversely related to the students' self-rated proficiency in and access to English.…”

Test Anxiety and Foreign Language Reading Anxiety in a Reading-Proficiency Test

“…However, FLRA does not always affect advanced L2 readers or exert a formative influence on beginning or intermediate L2 readers (Brantmeier, 2005;Frantzen and Magnan, 2005;Sellers, 2000). It was possible that advanced L2 readers were strategic at reading by nature while beginning or intermediate L2 readers invested more effort and time to compensate for their ineffective processing capacity.…”

Moving forward: Revisiting the Spanish for High Beginners course

“…Literature in language learning defines "false beginners" (in this article High Beginners, HB) as those language learners who are placed or register themselves in beginner language classes but have already acquired some knowledge-declarative or procedural-of the foreign language in different contexts (Frantzen & Magnan, 2005;Kuriyama, 2014;Nakamura, 1997;Sohn & Shin, 2007). Richards and Schmidt (2010) provide a general definition generally found in most of the literature on HB: "False Beginner: a learner who has had a limited amount of previous instruction in a language but who because of extremely limited language proficiency is classified as at the beginning level of language instruction" (p. 216).…”

“…Helgesen (1987) describes HB students' can-do abilities considering that "false beginners understand the meaning of a great deal of language and are able to engage in controlled, form-based (accuracy) activities, but their skills are very limited when they get into meaning-focused (fluency) situations" (p. 24). In the particular case of Spanish, this description mostly includes secondlanguage learners (Collentine, 2007;Frantzen & Magnan, 2005;Gascoigne Lally, 2001;Harlow & Muyskens, 1994). These students have taken two or three years of Spanish at high school and are therefore familiar with basic content of the language.…”

“…Although there is no consensus among researchers on the need of separating "false" and "true" beginners (Christiansen & Wu, 1993;Frantzen & Magnan, 2005;Loughrin-Sacco, 1990), the particular context of college level Spanish in the US and the kind of students entering these courses requires such separation if the intended goals of foreign language education are to be met. Despite administrative and instructional issues-which may encompass advising, placement, course content, assessment and particularly, instructors' training-a specific course to accommodate this heterogeneous group of learners is a logical and sensitive answer.…”