Multilingualism and affordances: Variation in self-perceived communicative competence and communicative anxiety in French L1, L2, L3 and L4

In this contribution, I investigate the effect of the knowledge of other languages on self-perceived communicative competence and communicative anxiety in the French of 953 users. I tested the hypothesis that knowledge of more languages, specifically other Romance languages, create stronger or clearer affordances (Singleton & Aronin, Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1: 83–96, 2007), which may have a strengthening effect on self-perceived communicative competence in French and lead to less communicative anxiety using that language. Using the database collected through a web-based questionnaire (Dewaele & Pavlenko, Web questionnaire Bilingualism and emotions, University of London, 2001–2003), I focused on participants who had French as an L1, L2, L3 or L4. The analyses suggest that when a language is either very strong or very weak, the knowledge of other languages does not play a major role. However, at intermediate levels of proficiency, multilingualism and affordances can serve as a crutch in challenging communicative situations.