Effects of Coping Strategies on Language Anxiety of Japanese EFL Learners: Investigating Willingness to Communicate

Abstract

While several studies have discovered authentic coping strategies for language anxiety that learners use in actual classroom situations, their effects in terms of anxiety reduction remains unclear. This study investigates the effects of coping strategies on the levels of classroom speaking anxiety among Japanese EFL learners, focusing on five coping strategies extracted by previous research (preparation, relaxation, positive thinking, peer seeking, and resignation). Incidentally, general statistical methods such as correlation and regression analyses should be cautiously used for those two specific constructs (coping strategy and language anxiety), because the difficulty in distinguishing the following two directions (entitled A and B) in one dataset could distort the results: (A) because learners feel more (or less) anxious, they need to use coping strategies more (or less) frequently; (B) because learners use coping strategies more (or less) frequently they feel less (or more) anxious. Therefore, the present study employs “willingness to communicate” as an alternative variable and exploits these statistical approaches to investigate the effects of the coping strategies. The analysis of 149 Japanese EFL learners indicated that preparation and positive thinking were significantly effective strategies for coping with speaking anxiety among the group, both of which are discussed in terms of more general perspectives. The pedagogical implications describe teachers’ responsibilities to enable learners to use these two coping strategies more effectively.

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