Sex and Age Effects on Willingness to Communicate, Anxiety, PerCeived Competence, and L2 Motivation Among Junior High School French Immersion Students

The students who participate in immersion education are an impressive group. In the present study we looked at students in a junior high school in Nova Scotia. In the local area, English is far and away the dominant language, though there are French-speaking communities within a 2-hr drive and Canada is an officially bilingual country. Therefore, the students are not in a “foreign” language-learning environment, but in all probability, they are not likely to encounter spoken French in their daily lives. The students have all the challenges of adolescence to contend with: moving from an elementary to a junior high school in grade 7, the wonders of puberty, growing academic expectations from teachers, demands from school administration to speak only French while at school, and the burgeoning social life of a newly minted teenager. On top of all this, participants in this research are required to give up their well-developed native language, English, and undertake to be educated in a second language, French. Impressive. The present study reports a cross-sectional investigation of second language communication among students in a junior high French late immersion program. The effects of language, sex, and grade on willingness to communicate (WTC), anxiety, perceived communication competence, and frequency of communication in French and on attitude/motivation variables are examined globally and at each grade level. Most of these variables have been widely studied among adult learners, most often at the university level. The present study attempted to look at a much younger group to examine the patterns earlier in the language learning process. We found that students’ second language WTC, perceived competence, and frequency of communication in French increased from grades 7 to 8 and that these increases were maintained between grades 8 and 9, despite a drop in motivation between grades 7 and 8 and a steady level of anxiety across the three grades. Gender differences in language anxiety were observed across the three grades. Contrary to our expectations, compared to girls, boys reported more anxiety in grade 9. However, the differences between WTC across the first and second language narrowed as students progressed through the program. [The present article first appeared in Language Learning, 52(3), 2002, 537–564]