L’anxiété langagière et la production orale : Une étude sur les étudiants suédois de français langue étrangère à l’université

Sammanfattning: This study aims to investigate foreign language anxiety at the university level. The concept of language anxiety is well-established within the second language research community, and is considered a distinct, measurable phenomenon. The pioneering research by Horwitz et al (1986), upon which much of the previous research on language anxiety is based, proposes that three categories make up language anxiety: communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. Their framework and questionnaire for measuring students’ levels of language anxiety (1986) have been used in this study to investigate to what extent students of French, in three different courses, suffer from language anxiety, and what the nature of their anxiety is in relation to these three categories. The results show that a sizable proportion of the students of French at the university level feel a moderate level of language anxiety, with the highest levels of anxiety being recorded for communication apprehension in the beginners’ course. Another significant finding is that anxiety does not seem to decrease when fluency levels increase. Furthermore, this paper investigates anxious students’ own ideas of what might be done to relieve their speaking anxiety. Students were found to believe in a correlation between having speaking anxiety and a lack of language proficiency, too little speaking practice, not being well-prepared, and anxiety-inducing teaching practices.