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This interview study sought to clarify the relationship between foreign language anxiety and
perfectionism. The comments of anxious and non-anxious language learners were audiore-
corded as they watched themselves interact in a videotaped oral interview. By examining the
reactions of the language learners to their actual oral performance and analyzing the audio-
tapes for instances of perfectionism, evidence was gathered suggesting that anxious and
non-anxious learners differ in their personal performance standards, procrastination, fear of
evaluation, and concern over errors. Because the results of this study indicated a link between
language anxiety and perfectionism, the article ends with a discussion of procedures that have
been used to overcome perfectionism and that may also be helpful to anxious foreign
language learners.
LANGUAGE TEACHERS AND RESEARCHERS fully or to understand what another person says
have been interested in the phenomenon of for- can easily lead to frustration and apprehension
eign language anxiety for a number of years. Hor- given that the apprehensive communicator is
witz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986) argued that for- aware that complete communication is not possi-
eign language anxiety is a specific syndrome that ble and may be troubled by this prospect.
may be related to three well-known anxieties asso- In the case of foreign or second language
ciated with first language use and everyday life. learning, fear of negative evaluation is likely to be
These are: communication apprehension, fear of manifested in a student’s overconcern with aca-
negative evaluation, and test anxiety. Communica- demic and personal evaluations of his or her per-
tion apprehension refers to an individual’s dis- formance and competence in the target language
comfort in talking in front of others. In the foreign (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991). Although it is axi-
language context, Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope omatic that language learning cannot occur with-
(1986) contended that the mismatch between for- out errors, errors can be the source of anxiety in
eign language students’ mature thoughts and some individuals because they draw attention to
their immature foreign or second language profi- the difficulty of making positive social impres-
ciency results in self-consciousness and anxiety in sions when speaking a new language (MacIntyre
some individuals. The inability to express oneself & Gardner, 1989). People who are highly con-
cerned about the impressions that others form of
The Modern Language Journal, 86, iv, (2002) them tend to behave in ways that minimize the
0026-7902/02/562–570 $1.50/0 possibility of unfavorable evaluations. Like com-
©2002 The Modern Language Journal
munication-anxious individuals, people who fear
Tammy Gregersen and Elaine K. Horwitz 563
negative evaluation rarely initiate conversation [2] motivation more from fear of failure than from
and interact minimally. Language students who pursuit of success;
experience this anxiety tend to sit passively in the [3] measurement of one’s own worth entirely in
terms of productivity and accomplishment;
classroom, withdraw from activities that could in-
[4] all-or-nothing evaluations that label anything
crease their language skills, and may even avoid other than perfection as failure;
class entirely (Ely, 1986; Gregersen, 1999/2000; [5] difficulty in taking credit or pleasure, even when
Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986). success is achieved, because such achievement is
The construct of test anxiety also seems rele- merely what is expected;
vant to a discussion of the anxious foreign or [6] procrastination in getting started on work that
second language learner. Some learners may in- will be judged; and
appropriately view foreign or second language [7] long delays in completing assignments, or repeat-
edly starting over on assignments, because the work
production as a test situation rather than as an
must be perfect from the beginning and continue to
opportunity for communication (Horwitz, 1986).
be perfect as one goes along. (p. 1)
Although the constructs of communication ap-
prehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test Other symptoms commonly observed in per-
anxiety have proven useful in understanding the fectionist students include an unwillingness to
nature of foreign language anxiety, relatively little volunteer to respond to questions unless they are
is known about the relationships between and certain of the correct answer, overly emotional
among foreign language anxiety and other per- and “catastrophic” reactions to minor failures,
sonality characteristics. Understanding these rela- and low productivity due to procrastination or
tionships would help teachers better understand excessive “start overs.”
the experience of uncomfortable language learn- Although perfectionism is intuitively recog-
ers and point to better ways to help these students. nized by many teachers and helping profession-
This article will, therefore, examine the relation- als, psychologists have tended to consider it in
ship between foreign language anxiety and a logi- association with other psychological traits. Pacht
cally related personality construct, perfectionism. (1984) argued that perfectionism plays a promi-
Communication apprehension, fear of negative nent role in several forms of psychopathology,
evaluation, and test anxiety evoke an image of a and several theorists believe that it is a less exag-
language learner who is overly concerned with the gerated form of obsessive-compulsive disorder
“appearance” of his or her communication at- (OCD) (Mallinger, 1984; McFall & Wollersheim,
tempts. Like anxious foreign language learners, 1979; Pittman, 1987a, 1987b; Salzman, 1968).1
perfectionists set excessively high standards for Recently, however, several researchers have raised
performance accompanied by overly critical self- the possibility that perfectionism, like anxiety,
evaluations (Frost, Marten, Lahart, & Rosenblate, can itself be an important source of poor school
1990). With respect to language learning, perfec- performance. In his book, Teaching Problem Stu-
tionist students would not be satisfied with merely dents, Brophy (1996) argued:
communicating in their target language—they Perfectionists show unsatisfactory achievement pro-
would want to speak flawlessly, with no grammati- gress because they are more concerned about avoid-
cal or pronunciation errors, and as easily as a na- ing mistakes than about learning. They are inhibited
tive speaker. Rather than demonstrating less-than- about classroom participation and counterproduc-
perfect language skills and exposing themselves to tively compulsive in their work habits. (p. 112)
the possible negative reactions of others, perfec- Readers familiar with the literature on foreign
tionist language learners would likely prefer to re- language anxiety are likely to notice a number of
main silent, waiting until they were certain of how parallels from it to these descriptions of perfec-
to express their thoughts. Such impossibly high tionism. It is important to note that as for anxious
performance standards create the ideal condi- language learners, the success of perfectionists is
tions for the development of language anxiety. often impeded because they spend their energy
Based on Pacht’s (1984) conceptualization, avoiding mistakes rather than focusing on learn-
Brophy (1999) catalogued a number of symp- ing. Not only do they refrain from classroom par-
toms of perfectionism in students that seem to be ticipation, but they also indulge in compulsive
counterproductive to learning of any kind and behaviors that negatively influence their work
especially so for language learning: habits (Brophy, 1999). Brophy’s descriptions of
perfectionists evoke several items on the Foreign
[1] performance standards that are impossibly high Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS; Hor-
and unnecessarily rigid; witz et al., 1986), an instrument used to identify
564 The Modern Language Journal 86 (2002)
language-anxious students. Anxious foreign lan- classes at the Universidad de Atacama in Chile and
guage learners agree with statements such as, who were participating in a quantitative study ex-
“Even if I am well prepared for language class, I ploring the relationships between perfectionism
feel anxious about it.” “The more I study for a and foreign language anxiety. This sample con-
language test, the more confused I get.” “I get sisted of the 4 most anxious and the 4 least anxious
nervous when I don’t understand every word my participants in the larger study according to their
language teacher says.” “I always feel that the scores on the FLCAS. Table 1 displays the mean
other students speak the foreign language better FLCAS scores for the 78 participants in the quanti-
than I do.” Conversely, anxious foreign language tative study and the scores for the 8 individuals par-
students disagree with statements such as, “I don’t ticipating in the study reported here.
feel pressure to prepare very well for my language The 8 participants were second-year students in
class.” And “I don’t worry about making mistakes the English Education program at the Universi-
in language class”(Horwitz et al., pp. 129–130) dad de Atacama. They had completed at least 6
Brophy’s (1999) suggestion that perfectionist years of secondary English language studies be-
students set overly high performance standards fore entering the university the previous year, and
that are accompanied by a fear of failure is re- they were preparing to become high school En-
flected in MacIntyre and Gardner’s anxiety glish teachers. Of the 8 participants, 7 were fe-
model (1991): male and 1 was male (high-anxious student No.
3). This gender ratio of 1:8 was consistent with
Thus, foreign language anxiety is based on negative the general population of students in the English
expectations that lead to worry and emotionality.
Education program at the Universidad de Ata-
This leads to cognitive interference from self-deroga-
cama. In addition, 7 of the participants were of
tory cognition that produces performance deficits.
Poor performance and negative emotional reactions typical university age and 1 (low-anxious student
reinforce the expectations of anxiety and failure, fur- No. 3) was a returning adult student. After com-
ther anxiety being a reaction to this perceived threat. pleting the FLCAS, the 8 students were asked to
(p. 110) participate in the interview phase of the study,
and all agreed.
Although the preceding analogy between for-
eign language-anxious and perfectionist students
is appealing, no study has examined the connec- Procedures
tion between these two traits. This interview The interview study reported here consisted of
study, therefore, sought to clarify the interaction two phases. In the first phase, participants were
of language anxiety and perfectionism in a group videotaped in a one-on-one oral interview de-
of language learners. Specifically, we attempted signed to elicit a sample of their conversational
to identify instances of perfectionism in anxious English ability. The oral interviews, conducted by
language learners and confirm that such reac- the first author, lasted about 5 minutes during
tions are less prevalent in non-anxious learners. which the participants were asked to respond in
Thus, in order to examine the relationships be- English to common conversational prompts:
tween perfectionism and language anxiety, the
comments of anxious and non-anxious language
learners were audiorecorded as the students
watched themselves participate in a videotaped TABLE 1
oral interview, and the audiotapes were examined FLCAS Scores
for instances of perfectionism. By having the par-
Mean FLCAS Score 58.28
ticipants review their videotaped interviews, this Standard Deviation 14.81
study also examined the reactions of language
learners to their actual oral performance, a sec- High-Anxious Student No. 1 34
ond area that has never before been explored. High-Anxious Student No. 2 37
High-Anxious Student No. 3 41
High-Anxious Student No. 4 41
METHODOLOGY
Low-Anxious Student No. 1 101
Participants Low-Anxious Student No. 2 100
Low-Anxious Student No. 3 97
For this interview study, the researchers selected Low-Anxious Student No. 4 92
8 students from a larger group of 78 students who Note. Low scores represent high anxiety; high scores
were enrolled in second-year English language represent low anxiety.
Tammy Gregersen and Elaine K. Horwitz 565
1. Where are you from? needed prompting at the beginning, all of the
2. Tell me about your family. participants readily offered their reactions to the
3. How do you celebrate Independence Day? tapes. These sessions lasted about 10 minutes.
4. Where do you go and what do you do on The students’ reactions to their conversations
vacation? were audiorecorded and transcribed. Each tran-
5. How do you normally spend your weekends? scription was then analyzed independently by
three raters fluent in Spanish and familiar with
The videotaped conversations were used in the the literature on perfectionism who catalogued
second part of the study to elicit the students’ indications of perfectionist or nonperfectionist
possible feelings of perfectionism and anxiety as tendencies as defined by Brophy (1999). Specifi-
well as any other emotional reactions. (An effort cally, the raters were asked to look for student
was made to put participants at ease during both commentary and reactions reflecting personal
phases of the study.) For rating purposes, perfec- performance standards, procrastination, emo-
tionism was operationalized as comments reflect- tional responses to evaluation, and error-con-
ing high personal performance standards and sciousness. The raters were requested to excerpt
procrastination, fear of evaluation, and error- from the complete texts any quotations that they
consciousness. After all 8 students had completed perceived as corresponding to perfectionist or
the conversation task (a period of about 1 week), nonperfectionist tendencies. The transcripts
they were invited to review their videos with the were presented in random order, so that the rat-
first author, and again, all agreed. In this part of ers, although aware that this was an anxiety study,
the study, the participants watched their vide- would be blind to the anxiety status of the partici-
otaped interviews and were asked to reflect on pants. Only those quotations that appeared on
their own performances. The students were given two or more raters’ lists are included in the ensu-
the option of making comments while the video ing discussion. Table 2 categorizes and summa-
was playing, or of commenting at the end of the rizes the number of perfectionist comments iden-
video, and, with only one exception (low-anxious tified for each of the 8 participants. As can be
student No. 3), the interviewees opted to com- seen in the table, the number of perfectionist
ment after viewing the entire interview. (We note comments offered by the more anxious partici-
that several interviewees groaned or made other pants ranged from 7 to 11, whereas the low-anx-
noises while watching the videotape.) This phase ious students offered only one or two such com-
of the study was conducted in the students’ native ments. In addition, of the three comment
Spanish. When the videotape ended, the inter- categories, it is interesting to note that the large
viewer prompted the students with such ques- majority of comments were judged to be of the
tions as “What do you think of your perfor- personal performance standards and procrastina-
mance?” “Did you like it?” Thus, in order to elicit tion type.
potentially perfectionist and uncomfortable reac- In order to triangulate these results, the three
tions from them, the interviewer gave the partici- raters were also asked to put the transcripts in
pants a somewhat evaluative orientation to their rank order from the most perfectionist (1) to the
performance. Although some of the students least perfectionist (8). Table 3 compares the perfec-
TABLE 2
Frequency of Perfectionist Comments
Personal
Performance Fear of
Standards and Negative Concern
Students Procrastination Evaluation Over Errors Total
High-Anxious Student No. 1 5 2 2 9
High-Anxious Student No. 2 2 4 1 7
High-Anxious Student No. 3 6 3 2 11
High-Anxious Student No. 4 7 2 2 11
TABLE 3
Rank Orders for Anxiety and Perfectionism