Psychological structure of students' language anxiety

The work is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of language anxiety – anxiety that occurs in the process of learning or using a foreign language. The main purpose of the study was to develop a methodology for assessing language anxiety and identify its structure. The procedure for creating Language anxiety questionnaire for is described in detail. Based on the method of a weakly structured interview, possible variants of the occurrence and manifestation of language anxiety were analyzed. The respondents in the interview were 4 women and 3 men aged 20-26 years with incomplete higher or higher education. On average, the interview took 40 minutes. The purpose of the weakly structured interview was to provide the most complete description of possible manifestations of language anxiety. Based on the results of the interview, the first version of the language anxiety questionnaire was created. Testing the questionnaire on a sample of 102 students allowed using factor analysis and the Сronbach's alpha criterion to identify 5 factors of language anxiety: fear of negative evaluation, fear of the consequences of mistakes or misunderstanding, tension and negative expectations, fear of the teacher and the lesson situation, fear of language use. This allowed us to create a final version of the Language Anxiety Questionnaire and show its reliability (consistency) and validity. In addition to the questionnaire, the concept of «language confidence» is proposed and the Scale of language confidence is highlighted. It is concluded that it is important not only to reduce the level of language anxiety, but also to increase language confidence.