Carlos Meehan-Rivas

Psychology

In this essay, I will focus on all feelings I had in the process learning a new Language, and for

this I will begin by explaining and defining the concept of anxiety, and then extrapolating it to

the learning of a second language.

Anxiety is an emotional response or pattern of responses (triple response system) that

encompasses:

Unpleasant cognitive aspects of tension and apprehension.

Physiological aspects (cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, muscular,

etc.) characterized by a high degree of activation of the autonomic nervous system.

Motor aspects (hyperactivity, motor paralysis, clumsy or repetitive movements, avoidance

behaviors, difficulties in verbal expression, etc.), which usually imply poorly adjusted and poorly

adaptive behaviors.

In addition to all of the above, there are a number of repercussions, in terms of cognitive

systems, on the occasion of the appearance of anxiety such as: worry, fear, fear, insecurity,

apprehension, negative thoughts, difficulty concentrating, disorganization, etc. .

The anxiety response can be solicited either by external or situational stimuli or by stimuli

internal to the subject (anticipatory responses), such as thoughts, ideas, images, etc. that are

perceived by the individual as dangerous or threatening.

If the anxiety symptoms are maintained over time, they would become disorders and there would

be no adaptive behavior. And if the stimulus is not threatening it would also be a disorder

(phobias).

We could say that there are two types of anxiety:

Positive anxiety, which is a consequence of real dangers,

And negative anxiety, which responds to fears that are only in our

imagination.

The first is good because it mobilizes us and leads us to seek a solution, while the second is

negative because it blocks us and prevents us from drawing gratification to life.

Anxiety always occurs as a result of difficulties in adapting to the changes that occur in our lives.

The brain has a concrete way of working. When something is of special importance to him, the

brain produces an emotional response. Whether good or bad, the brain repeats that same response

over and over again at the same stimulus. For example, what happens in your head whenever you

hear that special song or when you smell a familiar scent? The song or the smell makes you

come to the head, not only the memory of what happened, but also the sensations that your brain

has related to that situation. Anxiety works the same way, it gets "hooked" and activates

whenever something reminds you of your brain. Often, anxiety occurs for a real reason (a scare,

for example), but it is still maintained once the real danger has passed, since it is associated with

the event that motivated it with the response of fear.

How does anxiety manifest itself?

Negative anxiety occurs because the brain thinks there is a danger, when the reality is that there

is nothing that is endangering your life.

The problem of anxiety is in thoughts that the brain misinterprets as real. You know rationally

that they are not true, but you believe them emotionally, "you feel they are true." If your brain

believes that something serious is going to happen, it begins to send anxiety symptoms. That

thought can be a mental image (of yourself or another person or situation), a sound (your own

voice, someone's words, a noise or music ...), or a sensation in the body (tingling).

Anxiety manifests itself in many ways. We can summarize them in five large groups of

symptoms:

Escape / Avoidance: Avoid situations of daily life or escape from them.

Physical and psychological responses: Palpitations, heart shaking, or pulse acceleration;

Sweating; Tremors or jolts; Feeling of choking or shortness of breath; Feeling of choking you;

Chest tightness or discomfort; Abdominal nausea or discomfort; Instability, dizziness or fainting;

Feeling of unreality or being separated from yourself; Feeling of blunting, detachment or absence

of emotional reactivity; Lack of concentration or feeling of mind blank;

Feeling of loss of control: Fear of losing control or going crazy; To hurt yourself or others in an

uncontrollable outburst; Fear of doing something without being able to control.

Fears

Repetitive thoughts: Thoughts, impulses or images that appear in the head and can not be

avoided; Irrational behavior; Repetitive actions according to certain rules.

ANXIETY ABOUT THE LEARNING OF A SECOND LANGUAGE"Language anxiety".

From a few years to this part has been observed an increase in the investigation of the affective

variables that surround the learning of foreign languages.

In more recent years, in particular, the concept of language anxiety has been gaining both

visibility and empirical evidence, and this is possibly due to the frequency with which such

anxiety can make an appearance in the foreign language class Since many teachers did not find

answer to the question of why some people with adequate abilities in the learning and the use of

the language, found the study and use of an L2 so uncomfortable and difficult.

This difficulty can be made even more evident by emphasizing oral proficiency, communicative

competence in class, and whether students have to complete and pass formal oral exams in the

target language.

responds to the above question as follows:

"I think the answer to this question is in the unintelligent position where students are out of

necessity. The essence of learning a foreign language is the transmission of appropriate and

personally meaningful conversational messages through phonological, syntactic, semantic and

sociolinguistic systems that do not dominate.

One of the first problems associated with the investigation of the relationship between anxiety

and language learning has been that the anxiety that was initially studied was not what we

consider today as language anxiety, To anxiety in general, so their results were never conclusive.