Anxiety and EFL: does multilingualism matter?

The current study is motivated by the gap in the current literature about foreign language classroom anxiety, namely the underlying construct of FL anxiety with regard to the understudied relationship between anxiety, proficiency, and multilingualism. The evidence for the effect of language anxiety on achievement is well-documented. More recently, there has been evidence that anxiety is inversely proportional to the number of languages studied; however, this notion of the relationship between multilingualism and anxiety is under-researched. This study analyzes the anxiety profiles of low-level multilingual (LLM) versus high-level multilingual (HLM) learners of English, using 123 EFL college students in Korea. The participants completed the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS); a factor analysis, and subsequently discriminant function analyses show the differences in language learning anxiety from a variety of perspectives. An intriguing new factor emerged from the data: fear of ambiguity in English, a factor which has previously not been discussed in the language anxiety research. Additionally, the English language anxiety profiles of the LLM versus the HLM participants were also distinct, answering the question of the effect of various levels of multilingualism on language learning anxiety.