Anxiety and reading comprehension in Spanish as a foreign language

This study explored the relationship between language anxiety and vending in Spanish. The issues addressed were. (1) the effect of language anxiety on the reading comprehension and recall of university-level language students and (2) the effect of language anxiety on the vending process itself. A total of 89 participants, all students in two different levels of Spanish at a large university, took part in the study. Two inventories assessed two different anxiety levels. the Reading Anxiety Scale and the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale. Also, an instrument called the Cognitive Interference Questionnaire was used to assess the number of off-task thoughts of each participant while reading. The vending comprehension assessment measures consisted of a written recall protocol and a multiple-choice test. The results indicated that more highly anxious students (those with high scores on both anxiety inventories) tended to recall less passage content than did those participants who claimed to experience minimal anxiety. For the type of information recalled, the relationships between anxiety and recall were less systematic. Reading anxiety affected the number of important ("High") pausal units recalled, whereas foreign language classroom anxiety affected the number of supporting ("Mid") pausal units recalled. In both cases, highly anxious learners recalled fewer pausal units. In contrast, neither reading anxiety nor foreign language classroom anxiety affected significantly the recall of unimportant ("Low") pausal units. Results from the analysis of data from the Cognitive Interference Questionnaire indicated that highly anxious students tended to experience move off-task, interfering thoughts than their less-anxious counterparts.