Communicative anxiety in the second and third language

Abstract

The present paper reports a study on communicative anxiety of two groups of adult users. The paper aims at exploring the communicative anxiety of multilingual speakers and at analysing the communicative anxiety in second and third languages. This study includes 532 participants who were divided in two groups according their L1. One group of participants (N = 346) had Spanish as their L1 and the other group had Basque (N = 186). Quantitative and qualitative instruments were used to collect the data. Participants completed a background questionnaire and a questionnaire about communicative anxiety. In addition, focus group discussions and interviews were also held with the objective of getting deeper insights from the data. The results indicate that there are significant differences between the two groups of participants (Spanish L1 and Basque L1 speakers) in communicative anxiety and that anxiety is different when the second and third languages are compared.