Anxiety, language use and linguistic competence in an immigrant context: a vicious circle?

ABSTRACT

By exploring two novel concepts, heritage language anxiety (HLA) and majority language anxiety (MLA), this study draws attention to the hitherto neglected topic of language anxiety in immigrant and minority contexts. Based on semi-structured interviews with three generations of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands (n = 30), we investigate why members of an immigrant community experience language anxiety and how it affects them. Findings suggest that language anxiety in the immigrant context, in both its HLA and MLA manifestations, can be attributed to linguistic and socioemotional causes. These linguistic and socioemotional causes, however, are occasionally difficult to isolate and they often interact in bringing about a number of negative consequences. Immigrants may ultimately avoid using the language about which they feel anxious, which will in turn cause further problems in terms of conflicted identities and reduced proficiency in the language concerned. We thus propose that there is a vicious circle that connects bilinguals’ language knowledge, language use and language anxiety.

KEYWORDS:

• Language anxiety
• immigrant context
• majority language anxiety (MLA)
• heritage language anxiety (HLA)
• causes and effects
• Turkish immigrants

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants for taking part in this study. They further thank Dr. Marianne Gullberg and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions on earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yeşim Sevinç is a doctoral research fellow at University of Oslo, Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan. She received her BA degree in TESL at Istanbul University and her first MA degree in Linguistics at Kafkas University. She obtained her second MA degree in Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. In her first MA thesis, she studied individual differences between Polish and Turkish ESL learners. With her second MA thesis on the Turkish immigrant community in the Netherlands, she won the third best MA thesis prize in Belgium and the Netherlands awarded by Anela/VIOT in 2012. Her recent publications and PhD thesis address linguistic, social, psychological and physiological aspects of multilingualism with a particular focus on language anxiety in the immigrant context.

Ad Backus got his PhD in 1996, on a thesis on Turkish-Dutch codeswitching, and has been working since that time on various issues related to language contact, language change, and usage-based linguistic theory. He is Professor of Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. Recent publications include a number of book chapters on a usage-based approach to language contact and language change and a review article about minority languages in The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism.

Notes

1 The anxiety research in the classroom context has differentiated between different types of anxiety: speaking anxiety, listening anxiety, reading anxiety, and writing anxiety. Note that in the current paper the terms Heritage Language Anxiety and Majority Language Anxiety only refer to speaking anxiety. However, we do not imply that HLA and MLA are specific only to speaking.

2 In Sevinç and Dewaele (2016), levels of HLA and MLA were measured based on a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire that contained a closed question formulated as follows: Please indicate whether/how anxious you are when speaking the languages (Turkish/Dutch) with different people in different situations? Information was requested for levels of HLA and MLA in three social contexts (i.e. family, friendship and speaking with native speakers) through 18 items. The internal consistency of this part of the questionnaire was very satisfactory (Cronbach’s alpha = .85, n = 9 for HLA, and = .75, n = 9 for MLA).

3 The data used in this study were designed and collected by the first author with the approval of the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) in 2014 for the project ‘Language anxiety in the immigrant context: An interdisciplinary perspective’ carried out by the first Author. The data analyses were conducted by the first author and a research assistant based on ethical considerations identified by NSD.

4 Note that rather than that of official demographic statistics, we follow the tradition in sociolinguistics and contact linguistics here: the immigrant parents are the first generation, the children second, and the grandchildren are the third (Silva-Corvalán 1994)

5 Reliability for these combined scores was for HLA α = 0.85, N = 9, for MLA α = 0.75, N = 9.

6 Original texts can be obtained by contacting the first author at [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This study was financially supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme [project number 223265], which was facilitated by a doctoral fellowship to the first author.