Gifted and reception anxiety

Paper

The issue of students' reception anxiety, as one of the anxieties in language skills, has been extensively researched, but it is still open due to significant discrepancies in the researchers' findings. A number of questions are open, such as: whether reception anxiety in a foreign language is caused by problems in information processing (Rost, 2001); the importance of the affective, cognitive and behavioral components for the level of linguistic anxiety when receiving a message; the role of tolerance levels in receiving new and complex information in a foreign language in the manifestation of reception anxiety that exhausts the space for processing received information in a foreign language, etc. Sparked by these and other issues, i.e. inconsistency of researchers' findings in the field of anxiety in this language skill while learning and teaching a foreign language, this study aims to search for an answer to the question: what factors in foreign language learning and teaching underlie reception anxiety in academically gifted students. This is an exploratory quantitative research which is carried out using the method of systematic non-experimental observation on a convenience sample of 327 first-cycle students of Belgrade and Novi Sad University, of which 122 are academically gifted, i.e. with an average success (grade) above 9.00. The Likert-type scale (RJV) is used for data collection that examined the causes of listening anxiety: clarity of pronunciation, speech rate, inappropriate use of language strategies, fear of failure and inconsistency in the levels of communicative competence between the recipient and the sender of the message. The reliability of the scale expressed by Cronbach's coefficients is: 0.87. The structure of the student's personality traits is also observed as one of the factors, and the BFIIV personality traits test is also used as an instrument. Predictive variables are: personality traits, pronunciation clarity, speech rate, inappropriate use of language strategies, fear of failure and mismatch in levels of communicative competence between the recipient and sender of the message, success in learning a foreign language, year of study, students´ gender, and criterion: reception anxiety.
The main findings:
• Compared to other students academically gifted students manifest less reception anxiety.
• The results of the regression analysis have shown that personality traits together explain 23% of the variance in reception anxiety of academically gifted students.
• The factors of reception anxiety are: problems in information processing conditioned by clarity of pronunciation, speech rate, fear of failure and inconsistency in the levels of communicative competence between the recipient and the sender of the message, and education of the recipient i.e. the level of acquisition of communication skills in a foreign language as well as the reduced level of tolerance which stands out as a significant fact especially when it comes to complex information, which reduces the space for processing received information.