Student and Instructor Beliefs and Attitudes about Target Language Use, First Language Use, and Anxiety: Report of a Questionnaire Study

Abstract

This article presents the results of an anonymous, Internet‐based questionnaire study on target language (TL) and first language (L1) use in university‐level foreign language (FL) classes. The participants were 600 FL students and 163 FL instructors. The goals of the study were to develop preliminary components of a descriptive model of TL and L1 use and explore the relationships between TL use and student anxiety about TL use. It was hypothesized that (a) amounts of TL use would vary according to constellation of interlocutors and communicative contexts, and (b) the amount of TL use overall would correlate positively with student anxiety about it. The results support the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis was not supported. Analysis of the data revealed a negative relationship between reported amounts of TL use and reported TL‐use anxiety. Tenets are offered for maximizing TL use while at the same time granting to L1 pedagogically sound functions.

The influence of communication apprehension on the process of learning a foreign language

“…The hypothesis shall be verified by a combination of questionnaires -Levine [15], PRCA-24 [26]. The hypothesis shall be evaluated by a method of regression statistics, regression line, and correlation.…”

Debatable Issues of English Writing Apprehensions: A Qualitative Study of Taiwanese English Majors’ Perspectives

“…For example, Levine (2003) reports students from monolingual backgrounds tend to feel more anxious than students from bi-or multilingual backgrounds. Daud et al (2005) discuss how subjects suffer anxiety because of the lack of writing skills, and the interesting fact that better students experienced less anxiety.…”

Students’ Strategic Reactions to the Role of Native Language as a Medium of Instruction in English Classrooms

“…Additionally, to make it easier for the students, the researcher translated the questionnaire to Farsi so that there were no misunderstanding due to the lack of English knowledge. It was designed with some modifications based on the mixture of the questionnaires of Duff and Polio (1990), Macaro (2003), Olugbara (2008), and Levine (2003).…”

“…They stated that using code-switching would lead to negative transfer in learning a foreign language. Levine (2003) and Chen (2008) as advocates of cross lingual (code-switching) teaching strategy believed that L1 is a good strategy of efficiency in foreign language teaching. Code-switching helps the senders transfer the information to the receivers effectively (Skiaba, 1997).…”