The Future of Education

E-tandem is a foreign language (FL) learning (FLL) practice with a vast potential to foster FL learners’ speaking interaction skills. However, while participating in an e-tandem session, an issue that learners will face at an individual level is its foreign language anxiety (FLA) triggering effect. This variable, considered a debilitating type of anxiety, is associated, most of all, to the oral aspects of the FL use (Saito, Horwitz & Garza, 1999). Amongst others, FLA has a negative effect on learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) (Dewaele, 2001), interferes with communication, cognition and learning (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994), affects learners’ memory and reduces their learning capacity (Arnold & Brown, 1999). Due to its dynamic nature, FLA should be studied from a dynamic perspective (de Bot, Lowie & Verspoor, 2007), even if it has been widely studied by collecting data from students’ experiences using traditional quantitative or qualitative research methods (Horwitz, 2010; MacIntyre & Gregersen, 2012). In this study, we will analyze e-tandem learners’ FLA dynamics using the idiodynamic method (MacIntyre & Legatto, 2011), an innovative research approach that will allow us to triangulate idiodynamic, interview and self-report survey data of one case study. The context of the research will be an e-tandem project addressed to English as a FL students of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). The results of this study will contribute to a better understanding of e-tandem learners’ FLA, and to the enhancement of e-tandem projects in formal education environments.

Keywords: e-tandem, foreign language anxiety, foreign language learning, idiodynamic;