Psychometric assessment of individual differences in second language reading anxiety for identifying struggling students in classrooms

Abstract

Assessing learners’ individual differences helps identify students who need teacher support in classrooms. Previous studies have examined second language (L2) achievement based on reading anxiety because reading is an input-based activity essential for successful L2 learning. This study applied a latent rank model to identify L2 learners who are likely to be struggling or successful in classrooms according to their L2 reading anxiety symptoms. Moreover, a psychometric function was developed to determine the cutoff anxiety scores that discriminate against their substantial differences. The model was applied to responses from the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) provided by 335 Japanese learners of English. The results showed that the FLRAS classified students into three ranked groups with ordinal information regarding L2 reading anxiety. Rank 1 exhibited good conditions in L2 reading anxiety. Rank 2 reported high anxiety toward unfamiliar grammar during L2 reading. Rank 3 had even higher anxiety levels, especially for vocabulary and grammatical knowledge deficits and reading difficulty. The cutoff anxiety scores estimated by the model detected students who failed their L2 class with 79% accuracy. Theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical issues in language anxiety were discussed in terms of diagnosis and different approaches to teaching L2 reading.

Language anxiety does not affect the growth of L2 reading achievement: The latent growth curve model approach

“…These results suggest that when students' language skills grow, their sense of anxiety decreases, but the opposite direction was not observed. Such findings were replicated among Chinese-speaking students learning English as an L2 (Li et al, 2024;Liu & Dong, 2022;Zhao et al, 2023) and Arabic-speaking students learning English Almusharraf & Bailey, 2023;Hamada & Takaki, 2022). Together, these studies reveal the importance of going beyond cross-sectional data to corroborate causeand-effect relationships between the variables using appropriate data collection and analysis.…”

“…However, a long line of evidence has shown that early scores on L1 achievement and L2 aptitude are strongly and significantly related to later L2 achievement, including L2 reading achievement. In addition, recent studies in the L2 literature have reversed the assumption that language anxiety is a causal factor for L2 achievement by showing that language achievement precedes language anxiety (e.g., see Alamer & Lee, 2021;Almusharraf & Bailey, 2023;Hamada & Takaki, 2022;Sparks & Alamer, 2022, 2023Zhao et al, 2023). These findings from the L2 literature are similar to those in other areas of study cited earlier which have found that test anxiety does not predict performance on mock medical exams over and above students' knowledge level (Theobald et al, 2022), math achievement precedes math anxiety (Ashcraft & Krause 2007;Chang & Beilock, 2016;Finell et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2023), and working memory capacity moderates the relationship between anxiety and cognitive test performance (Owens et al, 2014).…”