An investigation of the impact of language anxiety on the tertiary ESL undergraduate students’ communicative competence in the three selected institutions in Lesotho.

Impact of language anxiety on tertiary ESL students

Abstract

The study set out to investigate the impact of language anxiety on the tertiary ESL undergraduate students’ communicative competence at the three selected universities in Lesotho. Present research point to language anxiety as a hindrance to second language learning and acquisition. This means that students who are anxious cannot learn the target language towards being communicatively competent. In exploring this impact, the study thus adopted a qualitative approach rooted in a case study. Through this design, data were collected in two ways; focus group discussions with (n=100) students from the three selected institutions and the face-to-face interviews with (n = 9) lecturers from the three institutions. Findings from the focus group discussions with students bring to surface students’ fear to speak because of negative evaluation from their peers as well as constant error correction by their lecturers. The findings from face-to-face interviews with lecturers reveal amongst others that students’ anxiety is manifest as a result of lack of exposure to English from high schools. The study thus recommends that high school teachers be equipped with communicative language teaching skills, so that students can be adequately exposed to language for ease of progression to tertiary level.