Foreign Language Listening Anxiety: Its Dimensionality and Group Differences

Abstract

This paper investigates foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA) in line with social and interpersonal anxiety studies. Language-learning anxiety has been conceptualized as a unique, situation-specific entity, and recent research in second language acquisition (SLA) has examined anxiety with respect to such skill domains as reading and writing as well as in terms of spoken interaction. Too much emphasis on specificity, however, might have led researchers and practitioners to miss common features of anxiety as affective processes under tension. A Japanese translation of the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS), which was created for Korean learners of English by Kim (2000), was administered to 452 Japanese learners. Data reduction through factor analysis indicated that this construct, as measured by the FLLAS, has three factors which were labeled Emotionality, Worry, andAnticipatory Fear. University major and gender were chosen as independent variables, and only the levels of the former were found to be significantly different in terms of one of the factors, Emotionality. Math students experienced more arousal of fear than social science students in this dimension of the FLLAS. 本論では、日本人大学生の英語のリスニングに関する不安感を因子分析と分散分析を用いて研究する。韓国語を母国語とする学習者向けに開発されたスケールを基にして作成した日本語版尺度を用い、この心理的概念の適切なモデルの構築を目指し、三つの因子を仮定する。また、専攻分野によって学生の不安感の構成にも統計的有意差が見られることも報告する。