Differences in Language Performance among High-, Average-, and Low-Anxious College Foreign Language Learners LEONORE GANSCHOW zyxwvuts Department of Educational Psychology Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 RICHARD L. SPARKS Education Department College of Mount St. Joseph 5701 Delhi Road Cincinnati, OH 45051 REED ANDERSON Department of Spanish and Portuguese Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 JAMES JAVORSHY Department of Educational Studies Purdue University zyxw lit: Lafayette, IN 47907 SUE SKINNER Graduate Program Department of Educational Psychology Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 JON PATTON Application Consultant Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 FOREIGN LANGUAGE (FL) TEACHERS AND special educators have long been puzzled by findings that some students are able to learn a foreign language with relative ease while others have repeated failures or learn only with great difficulty.1Among FL educators, otherwise suc- cessful students who have difficulty with FLs are often referred to as underachievers or as lack- ing motivation (22; 24; 25; 44; 47). In special education many of these at-risk FL learners are identified as having language learning disabil- ities (LLD), and this identification sometimes occurs only after a student has experienced repeated failures in FL courses in college (20; 35; 48). A number of explanations have been offered to account for why students have difficulties with FL as it is typically taught in school set- tings. Intelligence, for the most part, has been ruled out as having much significance in the determination of FL learning potential (4; 26; The Modern Language Journal, 78, i (1994) 01994 The Modern LanguageJournal 0026-7902/94/41-55 $1.50/0 46). However, other factors such as affective variables (motivation, attitudes, anxiety) and native language skills (oral and written lan- guage, listening, speaking) are said to influ- ence FL learning. Among the affective explana- tions, recent attention has been given to the role of anxiety (30; zyxw 31; 34; 37; 49). Proponents of the anxiety hypothesis suggest that FL learners have a mental block, similar to that ex- perienced by some students in math, test- taking, and speech-making. As for the native language factors that may affect learning a FL, difficulties with phonology and syntax, rather than with semantics of the language (vocabu- lary and reading comprehension, in particular), have been found to differentiate good and poor FL learners (18; 55; 56). A recent theory that postulates a relationship between problems in oral and written performance in native lan- guage and problems with the acquisition of a second language is called the “Linguistic Cod- ing Deficit Hypothesis” (57; 59). In a previous paper Sparks and Ganschow (57) proposed the possibility that there may be a confounding interaction between anxiety and receptive/expressive language skills. They sug-