A Meta-analysis of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale

This chapter presents a meta-analyses synthesizing validity evidence available on the most widely used tool measuring foreign language anxiety, the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) (Horwitz in TESOL Quarterly, 20(3):559–562, 1986), more specifically focusing on the FLCAS’s factorial structure. The data set comprised studies constituting k = 26 independent samples (with altogether N = 8,644 participants who filled in the FLCAS in their mother tongue) that reported exploratory or confirmatory factor analyses results in academic papers published in applied linguistics journals. The data was subjected to meta-analytic procedures using JASP (version 0.17.0). Findings suggest that the FLCAS is a consistent measure of language anxiety; however, its relative extensive length coupled with a limited scope calls for more efficient measures of the construct both for data collection and diagnostic purposes.