Reviewing the Anxiety and Motivation in Foreign Language Learning from the Perspectives of Definition and Classification

Many previous studies have identified "foreign language anxiety" and "motivation" as two important areas of applied linguistics. This study aims to evaluate the pertinent literature with also providing new information and justifications in past studies on learning anxiety and motivation. In this paper, the first section explains the concept of L2 anxiety and elaborates on the three most widely used classifications of learning anxiety: "trait anxiety," "state anxiety," and "situation-specific anxiety." Furthermore, according to the anxiety's impact on learners, it can be broadly divided into two types: "debilitating anxiety" and "facilitative anxiety." Then, the second section of this paper explains the concept of L2 motivation from the abstract to the concrete, divides learning motivation into two categories (i.e., "integrative motivation" and "instrumental motivation") by its importance to second language learning, and classifies them into two other different categories (i.e., "intrinsic motivation" and "extrinsic motivation") by introducing new theories. The last section summarizes the relationship between the independent variables of L2 anxiety and motivation, along with the dependent variable of L2 learning, and also the relationship between learning anxiety and language motivation, which provides some constructive suggestions to the students and teachers of related majors. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is to empower faculty to adapt their instruction to the motivation and anxiety of different students in various classes, which enables learners to strike a balance between motivation and anxiety in order to achieve effective and fruitful learning outcomes. [For the full proceedings, see ED656038.]