Korean EFL Learners` Anxiety Levels and Cross-cultural Learner Differences

TL;DR: This article examined how Korean EFL learners feel in their conversation classes and found that the anxiety levels of Korean learners were more similar to those of Japanese learners than to American learners of Spanish.

Abstract: Researchers in SLA have long recognized the negative effect of anxiety on language leaning. The first step in alleviating this negative effect is a detailed measurement and understanding of language student anxiety. This article examines how anxious Korean EFL learners feel in their conversation classes. A total of 819 university-level learners completed a questionnaire measuring foreign language anxiety. The participants did not show high levels of anxiety with regard to all of the four factors of foreign language anxiety (speaking anxiety, low self-confidence on foreign language ability, native speaker anxiety, and foreign language test anxiety), as well as overall anxiety. A comparison showed a noteworthy cross-cultural difference in foreign language anxiety scales: the anxiety levels of the Korean EFL learners were more similar to those of American learners of Japanese than to those of American learners of Spanish.