Applied linguistics in the age of anxiety

Abstract

It seems apt to allude to W. H. Auden’s titular poem, “Age of Anxiety,” as we introduce this, the 43rd issue of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. The poem was written in the midst of social, political, and psychological upheavals resulting from World War II. Today, the world is still grappling with social, political, and psychological upheavals amid global conflicts as well as the COVID pandemic. The applied linguistics and language learning landscape we find ourselves in today seems no different. Throughout second language acquisition research, the emotion of anxiety has been one of the most studied affective variables (Gass et al., 2020) and yet remains one of the more elusive variables to characterize and operationalize, given how highly personal, multidimensional, and vulnerable each of our experiences with anxiety is. Some attempts to characterize anxiety frame it as a kind of filter through which individual second language skills are experienced, such as speaking in another language. Other characterizations take a more global approach, portraying anxiety as a microreaction to macro-stresses, such as experiencing pressure to learn another language, especially if that language is the lingua franca, the learning of which can be viewed as the difference between an individual’s success or failure. In both of these examples, anxiety can affect a learner’s ability to process and recall new information, making second language learning and performance an anxiety-provoking task. It may, then, be no surprise that anxiety has traditionally been viewed as one of the primary obstacles to language learning. This is evident in early constructs like the affective filter hypothesis (see Dulay & Burt, 1977; Krashen, 1982), which was a metaphorical barrier made up of affective emotions including anxiety that inhibited second language learning, and it was only occasionally, in its mildest form of arousal, viewed as potentially facilitating (e.g., Scovel, 1978). While these early and traditional perspectives on anxiety are still present in much research today, the authors of the current issue challenge readers to continue to reconceptualize the innumerable roles in which anxiety appears to play in second language learning. In the first article in the current issue by Dewaele, Botes, and Meftah, “A Three-Body Problem,” the authors expand the traditional conception of anxiety to create a multicomponent framework, integrating it with language enjoyment and boredom. In expanding how anxiety is seen, their paper investigates which of three emotional variables—anxiety, boredom, or enjoyment—best predicts academic achievement in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. The research design used structural equation modeling and cross-sectional data from 502 learners in Morocco. The three learner emotion variables under investigation, foreign language classroom anxiety, foreign language boredom, and foreign language enjoyment were all found to predict