Foreign Language Anxiety and the Advanced Language Learner

Book excerpt: Does anxiety about learning and using a foreign language decline as learners become more competent in the target language, or is anxiety also relevant at higher levels of proficiency? This is the question Foreign Language Anxiety and the Advanced Language Learner sets out to explore. The aim of the book is to give readers an insight into what role anxiety plays in the language learning and communication processes of advanced language learners. Specifically, the study examines how advanced EFL learners’ foreign language anxiety (FLA) can be characterized; how anxiety relates to other individual differences (cognitive, affective, personality); and explores the relationship between FLA and various aspects of learners’ performance and communication experience in the target language. The research context is Hungary. The findings, however, are not confined to the Hungarian EFL setting. In addition to making a contribution to the clarification of some unresolved issues in language anxiety research—including the role of proficiency in the development of anxiety, the relationship between anxiety and other learner variables, and the much-debated question of whether or not anxiety accounts for differential success in L2 learning—this study has important implications for language teachers as well.