Fears and Language Learning: The Unsolved Knot

Is it conceivable that, in the era of globalization when English is used, abused, and misused in a variety of contexts for countless purposes, students of English as a foreign/second language (EFL/ESL) are afraid of studying/learning it? How is it possible that in our contemporary world students expressly and markedly indicate this to be the case? This phenomenon is what clearly emerges from the P.Æ.C.E. Corpus (Landolfi 2012a) where myriad fears are openly voiced. The P.Æ.C.E. Corpus was specifically designed to give EFL students to opportunity to express themselves anonymously about their language-related microcosm(s), sets of beliefs, preferences (P), expectations and hopes (Æ), certainties (C), and emotions (E). While the qualitative analysis of the data (nearly 1,000 texts) has unveiled a variety of fears, the quantitative analysis (more than 100,000 words) has identified the word FEAR(s) as the second most frequently used noun in the English subset of the corpus and PAURA (the Italian equivalent of fear) as the third most frequently used noun in the Italian subset. Both findings have generated, and left unanswered, several issues related to what EFL/ESL instructors can do to overcome this disturbing, though authentic, data-driven insight. The present paper discloses students’ discomfort issues at university level, identifies fear-activator fields, and discusses possible aspects that signal students’ negative learning attitudes. The study also proposes the use of guided visualizations as working solutions to overcome/minimize fears, motivate learners, and sustain long lasting learning paths.