Open AccessAnxiety and personality as indicators of academic performance in university foreign language classrooms
Author(s) -
Alan Martin Smyth,
Nuria García Manzanares,
Juan José Fernández-Muñóz
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
porta linguarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2695-8244
pISSN - 1697-7467
DOI - 10.30827/portalin.v0i36.15376
Subject(s) - psychology , test anxiety , foreign language anxiety , anxiety , foreign language , context (archaeology) , extraversion and introversion , personality , language assessment , test (biology) , big five personality traits , social psychology , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , mathematics education , paleontology , psychiatry , biology
The main purpose of this study is to test whether students’ performance in official language tests in the university context is influenced, apart from anxiety, by certain personality traits. A sample of 394 university students in Spain were assessed in language academic performance using the Test of English for International Communication: Listening and Reading (TOEIC L&R), Foreign Language Anxiety using the Spanish version of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), Test Anxiety, by means of the Spanish version of the Test Anxiety Inventory and Personality Traits through the Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). Frequency analyses for the categorical variables, and means and standard deviations for continuous variables were calculated, and a forward stepwise regression model was used to assess the independent variables that contributed significantly to the variance in the score on the academic performance. Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) correlated most significantly with student foreign language academic performance, followed by the Neuroticism dimension, Test Anxiety and Extraversion. These results show that anxiety can still be considered the best indicator to predict language academic performance and that personality traits do play a relevant part in the foreign language learning process in the university context.