The correlation between foreign language motivation and classroom anxiety at various proficiency levels

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine whether strongly motivated foreign language learners experience the decrease in classroom anxiety. As the subjects of her research the author is going to use 3rd year students of English in The Teacher Training College in Tychy and 1st and 2nd year students of English in the Higher School of Labour Protection Management in Katowice. As her research tools she is going to use Horwitz’s (1987) Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory, Gardners’s (2004) Attitude/Motivation Test Battery and Horwitz et al. (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale. By comparing the answers obtained as a result of administering the above mentioned research tools the author hopes to confirm her assumption that, depending on the proficiency level, low anxiety increases motivation but also that highly motivated learners suffer from lower level of anxiety. In the author’s opinion anxiety influences motivation to a larger extent among less proficient learners who seem to be more anxious than more proficient learners.