Authentic communication also becomes problematic in the second language because of the immature command of the second language relative to the first. Thus, adult language learners' self-perceptions of genuineness in pre- senting themselves to others may be threatened by the limited range of meaning and affect that can be deliberately communicated. In sum, the language learner's self-esteem is vulnerable to the awareness that the range of communicative choices and authenticity is restricted. The importance of the disparity between the "true" self as known to the language learner and the more limited self as can be presented at any given moment in the foreign language would seem to distinguish foreign language anxiety from other academic anxieties such as those associated with mathematics or science. Prob- ably no other field of study implicates self- concept and self-expression to the degree that language study does mately 90 percent of the time in their classes.
Some 65 percent of these students preferred
the use of the L1 in their classes sometimes or
often. While the first figure is comparable to
the one I found in my study, the second is
higher than the percentage in my study.