An Empirical Study on Second Language Anxiety among Beginners of Japanese

Abstract

Anxiety has recently attracted attention abroad as one significant affective factor in second language learning and acquisition. However, there has been no systematic study of anxiety in a target language environment. This study attempts to examine this factor. Aside from the concept of inside-classroom anxiety outside-classroom anxiety is introduced. Results show that in the case of beginners in Japanese language, more learners feel anxious outside the classroom than inside. They also show that there is low correlation between inside-classroom and outside-classroom anxieties and no obvious relationship between anxiety and Japanese language proficiency, age, previous residence or previous study of Japanese.