Language anxiety: Students' and teachers' perspectives in Japanese language classrooms.

摘要

This study attempted to discover factors that may be related to feelings of anxiety among students taking Japanese language classes. I intended to investigate both students' and teachers' perspectives on language anxiety in order to view the findings from different directions.; A questionnaire, the Reconstructed Language Anxiety Test, developed by Ando (1999), was distributed to students who were taking introductory Japanese classes and low-intermediate classes at a university in the Northeast. The questionnaires that were returned by the students were examined in order to detect the relationships between anxiety and class grades. The questionnaires were administered twice in order to examine whether any significant changes occurred: first one week after the semester began and again, one week after the midterm. After each administration of the questionnaires, I interviewed a few of the students with the highest scores, which indicated high anxiety levels, and the lowest scores, which indicated low anxiety levels. After completing the interviews with the students, I interviewed the teachers who were teaching Japanese in order to investigate the relationships between anxious feelings among students and the teachers' perspectives. The findings suggest that there was a significant negative relationship between course grades and language anxiety level at the beginning and the middle of the semester. Those students who had been to Japan had significantly lower anxiety levels at the beginning of the semester than those who hadn't, and those who evaluated themselves as beginners had significantly higher anxiety levels than those who evaluated themselves as intermediate/advanced at the beginning of the semester. Neither of these demographic variables, however, was found to be significant contributors to language anxiety by the middle of the semester. The qualitative results suggest that three major factors appeared to be pertinent to language anxiety: motivation, prior experience in learning and teaching, and beliefs of the students and teachers.