Investigating Social Anxiety among First Year LMD Students of English at Béjaia University and Coping Strategies

Abstract

The research into the relationship of anxiety to Foreign language Leaning (FLL) has provided mixed and confusing results because of the existence of numerous variables that can affect learning. Additionally, many works also dealt with Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA), its causes and the way to cope with it. However, few of them treat its social dimension in English as a Foreign language (EFL) context. This paper comes to explore one of the affective factors that can be existent in such contexts and that university learners live and experience the feeling of anxiety when having to do with social relationships in an EFL class. Our topic treats social anxiety engendered when learners have to put English in use. Having to use language in communicative situations and having to interact with peers is what we suppose to be the causes of social evaluative anxiety. For this, we used participant observation of six sessions with one group of 25 students. This makes the method purely qualitative and based on an ethnographic approach. Results showed that interaction mainly with the teacher is more significantly bound to social anxiety compared to peer interaction. In addition, learners displayed social fear from speaking in public mainly because they fear negative evaluation and judgment. They justify this by the menacing n ature of language speaking and they can be subject of negative judgment especially when making errors.