MEASURING LANGUAGE ANXIETY PERCEIVED BY
SPANISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF ENGLISH
Ana María Ortega Cebreros
Universidad de Jaén
Having students that perceive considerable levels of anxiety in the classroom has been regarded as an experience
that is more likely to occur in foreign language lessons than in lessons on other subjects of the curriculum. This
course of events seems natural if we take into account that in foreign language classrooms the students have to
cope with the demands of being able to sustain communication by means of an instrument they are not
completely familiar with. This consideration may have more or less unconsciously impelled most researchers to
study the problem of language anxiety with reference to groups of students of foreign languages at an elementary
level. But the problem of language anxiety is not exclusive to beginners. University students with an extensive
language learning background can also perceive considerable levels of language anxiety, as the results of this
study indicate. The main concern of this article is therefore to describe the author's experience of measuring the
language anxiety perceived by Spanish University students of English using a Spanish version of the FLCAS
(Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope 1986). Describing this experience has entailed in turn the following aims with reference
to the issue of language anxiety: (1) to review the different factors involved in the so-called foreign language
classroom anxiety experience as they appear reflected in the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz,
Horwitz and Cope 1986); (2) to discuss the process followed for attaining Spanish version of the scale that has
been piloted and can be applied to groups of Spanish learners of any foreign language for classroom research
purposes; (3) to present and discuss the results of administering the scale to a group of 33 Spanish students of
English who were studying their second year of English Philology at the University of Jaén in 1998; (4) to show
the pedagogical usefulness of this mode of enquiry as a way of openly addressing the issue of anxiety in the
language classroom.