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Dear Reader,

Are you having a blessed day? I'm writing this on a Friday, and I can't deny that the thought "TGIF" has been flashing in my mind on repeat like the sign of an American diner from the 50s.

This week was somewhat heavy for me because I had to sit on a few academic panels investigating so-called "academic malpractice", i.e. for the most part, students writing their assignments with AI. We used to do these meetings for plagiarism, but now plagiarism has essentially become a non-issue: after all, why would you plagiarise when you can just have ChatGPT write a whole assignment for you, brand new? Taking part in these meetings always makes me feel far too many emotions for one single person - sadness, madness, dispair at the current state of education, empathy for the student because god knows what drove them to make those decisions, and so on.

Emotional quagmire aside, I've also been busy thinking (with my own, non-AI brain) about the new concorso. As you might know, the bando was just published: if you've not had time to pore over it, here is my little summary in Italian for you. The short version is it's very much a carbon copy of the last concorso, so unless they publish some updated syllabi, not a lot has changed.

What do I have in store to help you prepare for it? Well, the short of it is:

1. I've updated the courses with new content and will add a few more updates soon, all free of charge;
2. I'm transitioning to an unlimited-access system for the courses (i.e. no expiry dates);
3. I'm thinking about running 5 or 6 new live revision sessions for the weeks right before the written exam, featuring quizzes and active recall exercises. I've begun consulting a few (hundreds) of you to find out how these sessions would best help you, so stay tuned for more while I work on these.

If you need to start studying and want to have a look at the updated self-study courses, now with unlimited access, they're at this page.

Another thing that kept me busy this week was running the Speak Better Teach Better course. One of the issues that emerged in our conversations was to do with learners' anxiety and how that makes them unwilling to speak in class. Maybe you've been one of those learners or have a few of those learners in your classes?

Whatever the case, the topic of anxiety is very much in line with this month's theme of "new perspectives on things you (kind of) already knew". In today's newsletter, you will learn about:

• How anxiety relates in very specific ways to language learning
• How it impacts achievement
• How it relates to two other key elements: enjoyment and boredom
• The role of teacher unpredictability in learner anxiety, enjoyment and boredom

I know that anxiety, but also, crucially, boredom and enjoyment are all aspects that permeate your work every single day, so this should be useful from a practical perspective. As an added bonus, if you're soon going to be studying for the concorso, a couple more notions about learner emotions will come in handy.

So, without further ado, let's get cracking!

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Initial caveat: the surprising pronunciation of anxiety

You know I love a little caveat before I delve into a topic. To keep with this time-honoured tradition that I'm pretty sure is only liked by myself, the caveat this time is: anxiety is pronounced /æŋˈzaɪɪti/. So it doesn't have that /ks/ sound (like, ironically, the word "relax"), but it's rather more similar to a /gs/ sound, almost. Here are 38,746 examples that you can listen to of people pronouncing this word. You know, just in case you were wondering how to fill your Sunday.

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Anxiety in the magical world of language learning

Having established this pronunciation, which, I'm not going to lie, took me a while to learn consistently, let's have a closer look at the topic: what is anxiety? And how does it manifest itself in language learning specifically?

Traditionally, researchers have distinguished between two types of anxiety: trait anxiety, referring to a personality trait, a chronic tendency to feel anxious, and state anxiety, which is more limited, meaning that you feel anxiety temporarily, only in response to specific situations you find threatening.

Studies going back many decades have identified a specific type of anxiety that relates to learning a language: some call it Foreign Language Anxiety, some Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety. I'm a maverick so I will call it language anxiety for short here. The most used definition of language anxiety is:

According to Horwitz herself in more recent work, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety can have both trait and state characteristics: although you may not be born with it (duh), that feeling of anxiety that gets you when you're in the foreign language classroom can become quite strong over the years and manifest itself every single time you have to use the foreign language.

Also according to Horwitz and her colleagues, this kind of anxiety includes 3 components:

1. Communication apprehension: worry about speaking, essentially, which prevents learners from participating in class
2. Test anxiety: a kind of worry specifically about using the foreign language for tests¹.
3. Fear of negative evaluation: worry about how we're perceived by others, notably our peers and teachers, while we use the foreign language

But researchers have actually gone further than this and identified and validated even more specific types of language anxiety when it comes to language learning: believe it or not, learners can exhibit signs of skill-specific anxiety. The one I'm most familiar with is listening-specific anxiety (panicking during a listening test and completely missing what they were talking about, anyone?), but there have also been studies on speaking-specific anxiety.

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Anxiety and enjoyment: two sides of the same coin?

Now, researchers are very valuable, but we could figure some of their findings ourselves, on an intuitive level: if you think about the relationship between language anxiety and achievement, you'll likely come to the conclusion that the more anxious the learner, the less they'll learn.

And you wouldn't be wrong: study after study has shown that high levels of language anxiety hinder the development of proficiency in the foreign language. It's kind of a no brainer: if you're anxious, you're less likely to engage, practise, take risks, so it's no wonder your language proficiency won't advance much.

In a pretty massive study, researchers Jean Marc Dewaele and Peter Macintyre looked at enjoyment and anxiety in language learning. They had responses to their survey from over 1,700 students (you read that right). And what did they find? First, the participants reported much more enjoyment than anxiety - a comforting finding. They also found that learners seem to progress from anxiety and towards enjoyment as they develop their proficiency.

In their own slightly mythical words, we could

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What about boredom? And teacher unpredictability?

Ah, the biggie. Having reviewed a few studies by Dewaele and collegues, including a study specifically on young teens, I can represent their findings as follows:

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⬆ Enjoyment ⬇ Boredom ⬇ Anxiety

Meaning: the more kids enjoy the lessons, the less bored and anxious they are - shocking, I know.

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⬆ Anxiety ⬆ Boredom

Meaning: more anxious learners suffer more from boredom, which could be linked to a lack of control and lower engagement causing these negative emotions.

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⬆ Teacher unpredictability ⬆ Enjoyment ⬇ Boredom

Meaning: learners enjoy themselves and are less bored with teachers who do not stick to the same routines in their class and vary in the way they teach. Interestingly, teacher unpredictability appears to have no considerable effect on the levels of anxiety perceived by the students.

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Language anxiety is a complicated but fascinating topic. And although some have looked at the input of very creative variables on language production (like Dutch courage, i.e. alcohol!), I still think it's worth accounting for the impact of anxiety and other emotions on language learning. It's a growing area of research and one that has a lot of potential in my view.

That concludes today's newsletter! I hope you found something valuable in there somewhere and I wish you a lovely Sunday with your loved ones.

Take care, dear teacher ✨

¹ Test anxiety is also widely studied beyond language learning. If you want a little primer, I talked about it here in connection to the ever-present debate of whether we should get rid of numerical grades.

P.S.: My weekly suggestion for things to listen to/watch/read to improve your English while relaxing: This week, I learned about something that's actually very much in line with today's emotion-related topic: the concept of Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). It's a relatively new construct in psychology, having only existed for 30 odd years. Some describe it as a personality trait, others as a kind of neurodivergence - a certain variance which I guess is to be expected when a new construct arises. Since it seems to be applicable to 15-30% of the population, I figure many of our students (not to mention us teachers!) will likely fall under this category, so I thought it would be cool to learn more about it. Here's the book I'm reading about it and a video from a psychologist I like.

✨Cool things I heard this week

Thank you for being a competent person in a sea of incompetence

(I chuckled a little at the image of the "sea of incompetence")

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