Foreign Language Anxiety of College English Teachers and Their Countermeasures

Literature Review

The study of students’ anxiety with regard to learning a foreign language began in the 1940s (Tunç-Pekkan et al., 2023). International language education scholars mainly focus on test anxiety, also known as test-taking anxiety. Lien H.Y. pointed out that language anxiety is the fear and anxiety that learners have when they need to express themselves in a foreign language or a second language (Karakose et al., 2023). Sun B.Q. has done a lot of research on foreign language classroom environment anxiety, which is the focus of foreign language or second language anxiety research today (Li et al., 2023). According to Sun B.Q., language anxiety in foreign language learning encompasses “special psychological activities such as self-perception, views on foreign language learning, feelings of learning a foreign language and learning behaviors caused by the unique language learning process in foreign language classroom learning” (Cao et al., 2023). He divides foreign language classroom anxiety into communication anxiety, test anxiety and negative evaluation anxiety.

Another researcher interested in foreign language learning was the American psycholinguist Krashen, who developed a second language acquisition theory in the 1980s which consisted of five hypotheses, namely: acquisition learning differentiation hypothesis, monitoring hypothesis, input hypothesis, affective filtering hypothesis, and natural order hypothesis. The Input Hypothesis holds that in the process of foreign language learning, the difficulty of information input to learners should be slightly higher than their actual level, which is the famous “i+1” theory (Hassan et al., 2023).

Anxiety scales are widely used in the fields of psychology and education. Anxiety scales can help evaluate an individual's level of anxiety in specific contexts. By self-report or observing the responses of others, scales can provide objective measurement indicators, helping researchers and professionals understand an individual's level of anxiety. The foreign language classroom learning anxiety scale, which measures the breadth and depth of foreign language learning anxiety, includes three aspects of foreign language classroom learning anxiety (Thoyyibah et al., 2023). These are: