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    The effect of multilingualism, sociobiographical and situational factors on communicative anxiety and foreign language anxiety of mature language learners

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc (2007) The effect of multilingualism, sociobiographical and situational factors on communicative anxiety and foreign language anxiety of mature language learners. International Journal of Bilingualism 11 (4), pp. 391-409. ISSN 1367-0069.

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    Abstract

    The present study focuses on individual differences in levels of communicative anxiety (CA) and foreign language anxiety (FLA) in the first (L1), second (L2), third (L3) and fourth (L4) language of 106 adult language learners. Data were collected about CA/FLA levels when speaking with friends, with strangers, and speaking in public. The analyses revealed that multilinguals do experience more CA in stressful situations in their L1, but that levels of FLA are higher in languages learnt later in life. The knowledge of more languages was linked to lower levels of FLA in the L2. Female participants were only found to experience higher levels of CA in L1 public speech. Older participants tended to report higher levels of CA/FLA across languages. Rank orders for CA/FLA were significantly similar across the L1, L2, L3 and L4, which suggests that levels of CA/FLA are relatively stable and could be linked to a lower order personality trait such as emotional intelligence.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: The publisher has requested that the full text of this item is not made open access until 12 months after publication.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): individual differences, second language learning, sex, age, number of languages known
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Jean-Marc Dewaele
    Date Deposited: 20 Feb 2008 15:54
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:29
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/647

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