To Err Is Human: A Reminder to Teachers of Language‐Anxious Students

ABSTRACT: This interview study examined the reactions of anxious and nonanxious foreign language learners to their own errors. Native Spanish‐speaking students were videotaped twice: first as they took part in an English‐language conversation with the researcher and then as they watched themselves in the taped interview. An analysis of the participants' English interactions and responses to their own oral performances indicated that anxious and nonanxious students differed in their ability to recognize their errors and in their reactions to making errors. Specifically, anxious learners made more errors, corrected themselves and codeswitched more frequently, overestimated the number of errors that they made, and recognized fewer errors in a stimulated recall situation. The implications for choosing error‐correction techniques are discussed.