Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

13
Facilitating anxiety in the EFL classroom: the other side of the coin
Christina Gkonou
Facilitating anxiety in the EFL classroom:
the other side of the coin
Christina Gkonou
University of Essex
cgkono@essex.ac.uk
Research on English language classroom anxiety (ELCA) has mostly
highlighted its debilitating nature stemming from learners’ low self-esteem,
demanding oral classroom tasks, and unfriendly lockstep teaching
environments, and resulting in learners’ low achievement in EFL (Horwitz,
2000, 2001; Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986). However, language anxiety
should also be viewed as having a facilitating effect or even no effect at all
on learners’ performance (Dörnyei, 2005). The ‘no effect’ position largely
originated from Sparks and Ganschow’s (1991) Linguistic Coding
Deficit/Differences Hypothesis (LCDH) stating that high performance in
foreign language learning depends on learners’ cognitive abilities, L1
deficiencies, and aptitude.
On the contrary, facilitating anxiety was shown to interact with learner
motivation and amount of effort invested in learning (Chastain, 1975;
Kleinmann, 1977). What facilitating anxiety actually represents is a kind of
alertness (Young, 1992), positive energy (Aida, 1994), and tension or
arousal (Ehrman, 1996) from the part of the learners in EFL situations.
More recent research indicated that students experience both euphoric and
dysphoric tension in the foreign language classroom; the former poses a
challenge to the learners, but it is controllable and promotes positive and
successful encounters with the language (Spielman & Radnofsky, 2001).
Criticism to facilitating anxiety though has been made by Horwitz (2010, p.
154) who argued that “it is intuitive that anxiety would inhibit the learning
and/or production of a second language” and that Kleinmann’s (1977)
study “unfortunately” indicated that “language students must be made a
little anxious so that they will work harder” (p. 156).
To investigate the effect of facilitating anxiety on Greek EFL learners’
classroom performance as well as the reasons why teachers occasionally
make their students anxious, focus group interviews were conducted with
twelve EFL teachers and nine EFL students in private language school
settings in Greece. The focus groups were formed by using pre-existing
groups, that is colleagues and classmates. The researcher opted for the
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