The Effect of Induced Anxiety on the Denotative and Interpretive Content of Second Language Speech

Abstract

N Previous research on anxiety and foreign language learning (see Scovel, 1978, for a full review of the literature) has focused primarily on the effects of anxiety on overall proficiency in a second language, which is typically measured by discrete-skills tasks or end-of-course grades. However, such measures of proficiency are likely to obscure some of the more subtle effects of anxiety on second language performance. For example, anxiety might affect the content and elaboration of second language speech as well as overall fluency and grammaticality. Indeed, research on the effects of writing apprehension has found that native-speaking students with higher levels of writing anxiety write shorter compositions, use less intense words, and qualify their writing less (Daly, 1977; Daly & Miller, 1975). If nonanxious second language students are more apt to attempt ambitious topics which require more complicated explication than their level of proficiency permits, they may actually appear to be less proficient than students whose anxiety restricts them to safer topics. Yet the nonanxious students may be the ones communicating at the higher level. Source of variation in the content of second language performance is, however, a relatively unexplored topic. For instance, Kleinmann (1977) found that the grammatical structures used by ESL learners varied with their level of facilitating anxiety; the informational content of their language was not examined, however. This study (Steinberg, 1982) explored the effect of induced anxiety on the content of oral descriptions, in a second language, of stimulus pictures. It was hypothesized that subjects undergoing an anxiety treatment and those undergoing a nonanxiety treatment would be differentiated by the proportion of interpretive to denotative content in their descriptions, with the anxiety group responding less interpretively. Since the study dealt with environmentally manipulated anxiety, it addressed an area readily susceptible to the intervention of the classroom teacher, that is, the atmosphere provided for student communication.