“It makes my whole body hurt”: Foreign language anxiety through the ages

Learning a foreign language in classroom setting can be veritably miserable experience. Nowhere is this better described than Buddenbrooks, where Thomas Mann dissects his young protagonist’s feeling of negative anticipation before class, with its attendant physical and behavioural symptomatology. Skipping forward eight decades, essay gives brief overview how applied linguists started using the construct Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) 1980s to explain deficient performance series deviant learner behaviours classes. It briefly clarifies FLA fit into institutional landscape US higher education, explains has since been refined by wider body empirical evidence. concludes discussing some implications for teaching similar instructional contexts today, while recognising that not majority people learn language.