The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and Academic Achievement: An Overview of the Prevailing Literature and a Meta-analysis

By E. Botes, Jean–Marc Dewaele, Samuel Greiff. Journal for the psychology of language learning, 2020

281 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Foreign language learners experience a unique type of anxiety during the language learning process: Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA). This situation-specific anxiety is frequently examined alongside academic achievement in foreign language courses. The present meta-analysis examined the relationship between FLCA measured through the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and five forms of academic achievement: general academic achievement and four competency-specific outcome scores (reading-, writing-, listening-, and speaking academic achievement). A total of k = 99 effect sizes were analysed with an overall sample size of N = 14,128 in a random-effects model with Pearson correlation coefficients. A moderate negative correlation was found between FLCA and all categories of academic achievement (e.g., general academic achievement: r = -.39; k = 59; N = 12,585). The results of this meta-analysis confirm the negative association between FLCA and academic achievement in foreign language courses.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f49ede34992d9f2e8cf093bddfe24a7c0b58cae

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Guiying Jiang
2. Lawrence Jun Zhang
3. Chengchen Li
4. Lin Sophie Teng
5. Aijiao Wu
6. (Mark) Feng Teng
7. Christine Goh
8. Hossein Tavakoli

In Education

1. Lawrence Jun Zhang
2. Guiying Jiang
3. Chengchen Li
4. Ju Seong Lee

In Language and Linguistics

1. Chengchen Li
2. Lawrence Jun Zhang
3. Guiying Jiang
4. Lin Sophie Teng
5. Jean–Marc Dewaele
6. Ju Seong Lee
7. R. Erlam
8. Aijiao Wu

Citations in the corpus

• Conceptualisation and measurement of foreign language learning burnout among Chinese EFL students (2021, background): “In three recent meta-analyses by Botes, Dewaele, and Grei ff (2020), Teimouri, Goetze, and Plonsky (2019) and Zhang (2019), the results show a consistent moderate negative correlation between foreign language anxiety and FL performance ( r = − .39, r = − .36, and r = − .34 respectively).”