Reliability of Listening Anxiety for Language Learners: A Test-Retest Reliability Perspective

Identifying skill-based language anxiety has advanced research on this topic. Recent research syntheses (Teimouri et al., 2019; Zhang, 2019) have reported that language anxiety is negatively correlated with performance and that listening anxiety has a larger impact on language achievement than do the other three skills (i.e., speaking, reading, and writing). This finding provides evidence that listening anxiety is an important factor influencing students’ language learning. Therefore, in line with the recent emphasis on state language anxiety (Gregersen et al., 2014), the current study aims to investigate the changes in listening anxiety from a test-retest reliability perspective. A listening anxiety scale (Chen & Hsiao, 2016), based on the results of a qualitative study (Vogely, 1998), will be used to measure learners’ listening anxiety. It is expected that this test-retest reliability study will offer language teachers and researchers with immediate insights into whether some specific listening anxiety behaviors change over time, thereby providing implications for designing classroom activities and developing anxiety scales for language learning, teaching, and research.