Language Anxiety

When investigating foreign language anxiety, there are two main theoretical considerations that need to be considered. On the one hand, anxiety is an emotion that has been studied widely in the field of psychology, which means that when conducting research about language anxiety, there is considerable accumulated knowledge that applied linguists can rely on. On the other hand, since the 1970s, there has been a surge in scholarly work focusing specifically on language anxiety which has also added to our theoretical understanding of this emotion specific to language learning and use (Dewaele and Li in Foreign Lang World 196:34–49, 2020). The chapter begins by providing a definition for language anxiety and moves on to discuss its characteristics as well as the different theoretical frameworks it has been studied in. The chapter ends by outlining theoretical avenues for future research on language anxiety.