Sources of Individual Differences in L2 Narrative Production: The Contribution of Input, Processing, and Output Anxiety

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of cognitive task complexity and individual differences in input, processing, and output anxiety (IPOA) on L2 narrative production. The participants were enrolled in a bilingual secondary educational program. They performed two narrative tasks in speech and writing. The participants’ level of anxiety was assessed using the IPOA scale (MacIntyre and Gardner 1994). The results demonstrate that spoken and written modalities are influenced differently by anxiety with the impact of output anxiety being significantly stronger in speech than in writing. Another important finding was that input and processing anxiety had both facilitating and debilitating effects on learners’ L2 output. As regards the effect of task complexity on participants’ narratives, the findings suggest that the different stages of language production need to be taken into account when categorizing tasks on the basis of the cognitive load they impose on learners.

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“…However, controversies exist regarding the role of negative activating emotions such as anxiety, guilt and shame (Marcos-Llinás and Garau, 2009;Teimouri, 2018;. As for anxiety, researchers reported contradictory results in terms of whether anxiety exerts a debilitating effect (Oya et al, 2004;Shao et al, 2013;, a facilitating effect (Marcos-Llinás and Garau, 2009;Trebits, 2016), or no effect on L2 achievement (In'nami, 2006). Zhang's (2019) meta-analysis showed that anxiety was overall negatively correlated with L2 performance and that the controversies among previous studies may be explained by the moderator variables such as the anxiety type, age, and lexical similarity.…”

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“…Each measure of syntactic complexity was useful for capturing language development since the best‐fitting model for each measure showed a significant and meaningful increase in complexity in the speeches over time. Complexity, particularly in speech, is expected to be retarded by limitations in cognitive load (Trebits, ); these results suggest that with increasing proficiency, cognitive resources are available for complexifying the language performance. There was no decrease or plateau in any type of complexity (such as subordination) in these data, echoing De Clercq and Housen's () findings, despite expectations about the development of syntactic complexity (e.g., Lambert & Kormos, ; Norris & Ortega, ).…”

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