The Relationship Between English Language Anxiety and Academic Performance

Abstract

English is for millions of learners, not just a subject, but the means of instruction and evaluation. In these environments, the fear of English use can impact not only academic work in English classes, but also students' participation, self-confidence, and curriculum achievement. The current literature is reviewed in this paper as far as theories and studies concerning English language anxiety are concerned, and its correlation with academic achievement. It reviews the evolution of this construct starting from the early studies on foreign language classroom anxiety up to the current metaanalytical evidence, analyses the cognitive and affective mechanisms that have been suggested to account for the relationship between anxiety and performance as well as discusses moderators such as proficiency, foreign language learning context, and individual differences. The review shows that language anxiety is consistently negatively related to language achievement and that the relationship between language anxiety and general academic achievement in English-medium environments could be either negative or positive, although the findings were not as strong and were less studied. It also points out a few issues that are still to be resolved – problems of causal direction, that low levels of anxiety may be facilitating and the scarcity of evidence in many multilingual contexts, such as in South Asia. The paper ends with implications for teaching, assessment and institutional support, and suggests a research design for future empirical research. It is a study of the literature and is not original.

Keywords: English Language Anxiety, English as a Foreign Language (EFL), Academic Achievement, Affective Factors, Higher Education, Classroom Anxiety.