Paper short abstract:

This survey, conducted among first-year university students majoring in Japanese language in Moscow, was about psychological anxiety that arises when learning and using Japanese.

Paper long abstract:

This survey, conducted among first-year university students majoring in Japanese language in Moscow, was about psychological anxiety that arises when learning and using Japanese. In the survey, questions from the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) (Horwitz, et al., 1986) and the Japanese Language Anxiety Scale (JLAS) (Motoda, 2000) were used.

In the FLCAS, learners seemed to strongly agree with the following statements: "I get upset when I don't understand what the teacher is correcting.", "I worry about the consequences of failing my foreign language class.", and "I feel overwhelmed by the number of rules you have to learn to speak a foreign language."

The JLAS results showed that learners tend to feel more anxious when they use Japanese language outside the classroom than inside the classroom. In the classroom, they tend to "worry about making mistakes in Japanese" and "get frustrated when they don't know the answer to a question that the teacher asks". On the other hand, they disagree with statements such as: "I am afraid that the other students will think my Japanese isn't good." and "I am afraid that the other students will laugh at me when I speak Japanese." Outside the classroom, they strongly agreed that they get nervous when they don't understand what a Japanese person says and don't know how to react, and there was also a tendency to feel strong anxiety in other situations. In contrast, the learners worried less about the presence of other learners with higher Japanese proficiency or that Japanese people would laugh at their Japanese.

The results of this survey are valuable in trying to improve the educational environment in consideration of the characteristics of anxiety perceived by Japanese language learners in Moscow's higher education institutions. In particular, it is expected that learning in pairs or in a group can allow learners to perform with less anxiety in the classroom. In addition, the results suggested that teachers should consider specifying corrections, feedback on language misuse, and other methods for presenting exams and study content.

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