Exploring language anxiety in young German and French heritage speakers - a pilot study

Talk by PhD student Annika Schimpff.

Abstract

In my PhD project, I am exploring language anxiety (LA) experienced by adolescent heritage speakers of German and French in an Australian and Danish context. LA has increasingly been recognized as an influential factor for language learning, language achievement and language maintenance. Previously, LA has primarily been examined in the foreign language classroom context, and only few studies have investigated LA in other contexts, such as heritage language contexts. The limited research may in part be due to a lack of instruments adequately capturing language anxiety outside of the traditional classroom context. Therefore, I will specifically focus on the creation and preliminary results of my competency-specific language anxiety scales. Data was collected last semester in Australia. Finally, I would like to discuss how these initial findings will guide my data collection in Denmark.