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In:Bridging Boundaries: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Hispanic Linguistics
Edited by Gregory L. Thompson and Scott M. Alvord
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 46] 2026
► pp. 194–223

Chapter 8
Linguistic manifestations of anxiety

Complexity, accuracy, and fluency in L2 Spanish writing

 | Grand Valley State University
 | University of Minnesota
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Numerous studies report an inverse relationship between general foreign language anxiety (FLA) and language achievement (e.g., Chastain, 1975; Gregersen, 2020), as well as between task anxiety (TA) and diminished overall performance (Chastain, 1975; Salehi & Marefat, 2014). Few studies, however, investigate anxiety’s impact on specific aspects of linguistic performance, such as accuracy, syntactic complexity, or lexical diversity. This project addresses this gap by exploring how the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of written texts produced by intermediate second language learners of Spanish vary according to the writer’s general FLA and TA. Sixty-one fourth-semester students of Spanish completed the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope, 1986) and pre- and post-task questionnaires in addition to writing five texts as part of a summative course proficiency assessment. Participants’ texts were assigned a holistic rating based upon four criteria — task fulfillment (length), vocabulary (breadth), discourse (organization), and use of present and past time frames — in an institutional proficiency assessment rubric; texts were coded for eight measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency that aligned with the rubric criteria. A series of linear regression models were run and results revealed that TA, as opposed to FLA, demonstrated a more consistent relationship with linguistic performance on the writing task; higher levels of TA were associated with greater accuracy and lexical diversity but lower fluency. The discussion explores the complex interplay of anxiety and linguistic performance and considers implications of the findings for the interpretation of learner performance on instructional and research tasks.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Foreign language anxiety
    • 2.2Task anxiety
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Tasks
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Anxiety
    • 4.2Overall performance
    • 4.3Complexity: Length of syntactic units
    • 4.4Complexity: Subordination
    • 4.5Complexity: Lexical diversity
    • 4.6Accuracy
    • 4.7Fluency
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Implications and limitations
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
  • Appendix
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