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Reduction and management
The reduction of foreign language anxiety necessitates the involvement of both the student and the teacher, each of which are able to adopt strategies to mitigate anxiety.

Students play an active role in acknowledging and managing their foreign language anxiety. The first step of recognizing and acknowledging the anxiety is needed in order to communicate their needs with their teacher and more effectively reach a strategy for reducing their anxiety. Specifically recognizing what types of foreign language activities induce their anxiety and what their personal language style is also helps as a first step in controlling the anxiety. From there, the student can seek help and support. Recommended personal strategies for reducing foreign language anxiety include joining language clubs, journal writing, positive self-talk, and in general taking advantage of any opportunities to use the language. Support groups can also be a useful tool, as well as other forms of collaboration among peers at a similar level of experience with the language.

Teachers also can adopt strategies and teaching methods that can help prevent foreign language anxiety. Teaching-based strategies for reducing foreign language anxiety involve fostering a comfortable and relaxed classroom environment in which the teacher is supportive and friendly. Focusing on positive reinforcement rather than negative errors and normalizing mistakes can help create an ideal classroom environment. For instance, teachers can adopt a "modeling approach" in which, rather than explicitly correcting errors in front of everyone in the class, the teacher repeats the utterance back to the student, but with the errors fixed. Specific strategies that teachers can use in the classroom include playing language games, conducting grammar language in the native language instead of the target language, leading group activities, and facilitating discussions of anxiety so that students can document and recognize their own anxiety as well as understand that other students may feel the same way. Offering additional help outside of class can also be helpful.

One study recommends teaching songs in the classroom as a specific methodological strategy that can improve academic performance, which in turn decreases the anxiety level of students as they become more comfortable and proficient in the language. The study found that this tool is most beneficial to those with high anxiety.

Causes
Although all aspects of using and learning a foreign language can cause anxiety, both listening and speaking are regularly cited as the most anxiety provoking of foreign language activities. Foreign language anxiety is usually studied and seen in a language classroom situation. It has been argued that language learning is a "profoundly unsettling psychological proposition" as it jeopardizes an individual's self-understanding and perspective.

General theories of anxiety can help explain the root of foreign language anxiety. The following theories of anxiety play a role in describing foreign language anxiety:


 * self-efficacy and appraisal: An anxiety reaction first depends on the individual's appraisal of how threatening a situation is. In the case of a perceived threatening situation, the amount of anxiety then depends on the individual's perception of their self-efficacy, or their confidence in their ability to deal with and effectively control the situation. Potential negative events that individuals do not believe they are equipped to handle often lead to anxiety. In terms of foreign language learning, appraisals of a foreign language situation as threatening combined with self-deprecating thoughts about language ability which decrease an individual's self-efficacy contribute to foreign language anxiety:
 * state, trait, and situational anxiety: Anxiety can be classified into trait anxiety, state anxiety, and the more recent distinction of situation-specific anxiety. Individuals with trait anxiety have chronic, persisting anxiety in all situations, whereas individuals with state anxiety are only anxious in particular situations. Applying this theory to learning a language results in the additional distinction of situation-specific anxiety, which builds on state anxiety to describe when a particular situation induces anxiety only when specific conditions (e.g. a foreign language) are at play.

When applied specifically to a classroom situation, the causes of foreign language anxiety have been broadly separated into three main components: communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. Communication apprehension is the anxiety experienced in speaking or listening to other individuals. Test-anxiety is a form of performance anxiety associated with the fear of doing badly or failing altogether. Fear of negative evaluation is the anxiety associated with the learner's perception of how other onlookers (instructors, classmates or others) may negatively view their language ability. These three factors cause an increase in the appraised threat as well as a decrease in self-efficacy. In addition, specifically in an ESL classroom, students learning a foreign language out of their country are very vulnerable to high levels of anxiety about language learning because they perceive more social distance between them and the native speakers of the target language and may experience a language shock.

Sparks and Ganschow draw attention to the fact that anxiety could be a cause of poor language learning or a result of poor language learning. If a student is unable to study as required before writing a language examination, the student could experience test anxiety. Context anxiety could be viewed as a result. In contrast, anxiety becomes a cause of poor language learning when it is due to anxiety that student is unable to adequately learn the target language.

There is a psychological component to foreign language anxiety as well; language learning is a "profoundly unsettling psychological proposition" as it jeopardizes an individual's self-understanding and perspective. It stems from one's self-perceptions of language ability. Foreign language anxiety is rooted in three psychological challenges:


 * performance difficulty
 * threat to one's image
 * identity conflict

Those psychological states thus have task-performance and identity dimensions. People tend to act or speak in a way that would be judged appropriate to the other people native to the foreign culture, but the behavior that individuals are producing grapples with ingrained values and behaviours. Emotions by the psychological challenges has something to do with attempting to switch codes in an interactive encounter.

The main causes of foreign language anxiety are communication-apprehension, text anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. There is also a psychological component to foreign language anxiety.

Foreign language anxiety has a variety of detrimental effects on foreign language performance, but both the student and the teacher can adopt strategies to minimize the anxiety.