Anxiety in Foreign Language Classrooms

I have finished my 6 week course in Arabic at the University of Utah. Throughout the course I became really interested in how people pickup vocabulary in foreign languages and especially how people deal with stress and the anxiety of learning a Less Commonly Taught Language (LCTL). In the past I have always had a remarkably easy time memorizing and remembering the vocabulary in Spanish and Portuguese. Having learned languages similar to English this is of course an expected outcome for learners.

However, with Arabic I struggled to pickup the vocabulary quickly, especially because the vocabulary was being thrown at me at an incredible rate at about 20+ words a day - more or less- and then I was expected to recognize around half of the vocabulary that was on the list to learn. In addition to this the foreign script and unfamiliar sounds made visualization of the word even more difficult to tackle. So I set out to learn a way to memorize vocabulary more easily.

I researched some of the more common ways to learn vocabulary. With no surprise Mnemonics were the tips topping most lists. Relating the new word to a word you already know seems to be the most dominant way to memorize vocabulary that seems difficult. For example, relating the new word to any word you know that sounds similar to the new word, and then putting a mental image in your head relating the two words together. As an example take the word al-izdham(الازدحام), which I related to the words "his ham," then I imagined people crowding around his ham, and the rest is the magic of mnemonics. This technique in most research seems to be the most effective since the visual and auditory queues help to store the vocabulary more readily in the mind, and eventually the mnemonic device becomes unnecessary.

Another problem that seems to be evident at least within my studies in Arabic and possibly of LCTLs is that the vocabulary is not presented in orderly fashion, which means that the new vocabulary is presented to the student in the form of a story, which means that the new vocabulary is essentially random, and may or may not have any real utility for the student. This is the biggest problem in learning and teaching a language, and the fact is students will not strive to retain any vocabulary that will not be directly useful to them. Useful vocabulary is anything that is used multiple times or information that is necessary for what the student has the desire to communicate, and for the most part the random vocabulary presented may not represent what the student wants to say. I`ve found that the best way to learn the vocabulary with a solid foundation is to use the vocabulary in a contextual environment, which means that writing the vocabulary out in context plays a key role in remembering any of it, and the advantage of reading and hearing the new vocabulary in context from a native text is also extremely useful as well.

I also audited the 6 week course that I took, which means I didn't` have the pressure of a final grade or the stress of failing in a language which was completely foreign to me. More than half of the students in both sections of the course dropped the course, because of emergencies, fears, and a general lack of confidence. Students taking the class for a grade had an incredible time coping with the stress of the class. Although I was auditing the course I tried to keep myself to the same levels as the other students earning a grade, and I did just that, as I kept up with most of the homework during the program, and I didn`t miss a day of the 6 week course. With that said I had a very stressful 10 hour per day schedule. After the first week I was feeling stressed, and came close to dropping the course.

During the course I noticed a fluctuation in the anxiety levels of most of my classmates. During the first week of learning the script and learning to write students were noticeably more anxious and insecure of their abilities. The initial shock of the program also caused the anxiety that lead to most people leaving the course, even a linguistics major, who seemed content on staying throughout the course. From what I've read about anxiety in the classroom, and especially LCTLs anxiety when learning is not a useful strategy. Certainly a healthy amount of anxiety is natural and happens in most classroom situations, but when the anxiety becomes higher, then students tend to underperform, or drop out, and stop learning the language completely.

This underscores an essential problem in learning LCTLs, because the anxiety of learning something completely foreign with a different script and drastically different sound patterns makes learning something more difficult than with the languages that are taught and learned more frequently. Unlike Spanish the Arabic language takes a considerably longer amount of time to master, which means the learner is forced to become much more patient in order to gain even intermediate proficiency. This is a frustrating aspect to learning a language such as Arabic, because the language does not lend itself very easily to foreigners, and is unremitting when it comes to the desires of the learner. Although I should warn future learners that past the initial hurdles of a beginning course there is hope on the horizon, and that you too can begin to understand and speak such a foreign language.

There are of course numerous problems that work against learners of LCTLs. Arabic is one that really requires a fight to gain any proficiency at all and proficiency that lasts and can create an effective communication between you and a native of the language. Arabic is unfortunate in that there are multiple dialects that can vary greatly between countries, and speaking Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has the tendency to come of as elitist. This means that most learners will at some point need to come in contact and partially master a dialect of the language in order to have a greater and more conversational usage of the language.

I can only say that in order to combat this there are several tactics that one might take to eliminate the numerous problems that exist within teaching LCTLs. My suggestions below, with some reiteration:

I've planned to take the Fall course in Arabic at my university as well, and I hope that I will be able to report back the progress that I`ve made from the remainder of my summer and what I happen to learn as the new semester begins. It will be an interesting experience, and interesting to see how far I am able to progress in my studies.