The Effect of Foreign Language Anxiety on EFL Students’ Cognitive Processing in Working Memory

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of foreign language anxiety (FLA) on English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students’ cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli. Methods: The participants were ۱۷۹ upper-intermediate or advanced EFL learners from different branches of an English language teaching institute. They were asked to fill out the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) questionnaire and then, considering their scores, were randomly assigned to high-anxiety and low-anxiety groups. To analyze the EFL learners’ cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli, a semantic decision task was used in the present study. In this task, participants saw a pair of words presented one after each other and were asked to decide whether the target word was related in meaning to the preceding prime word. Mixed Factorial Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on error rate (ER) data to establish the potential interaction between primes and targets. To reveal any potential anxiety effects, anxiety was run as a between-subject factor in the analysis. Results: The findings showed a statistically significant effect of anxiety on cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli with respect to ER. More specifically, the EFL students in the low-anxiety group made fewer errors in comparison to their counterparts in the high-anxiety group. Conclusion: The findings are attributed to the attentional control theory and cognitive overload of working memory, cognitive interference theory, and the specific nature of the task used in the present study. The results emphasize the fact that FLA could result in deficits in cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli by foreign language learners.

کلیدواژه ها:

Foreign language anxiety ، cognitive processing ، working memory ، attentional control theory ، cognitive interference theory