Same Learners, Different Anxieties: Comparing L2 Korean and L3 English Learning Anxiety among Immigrant Children

This study examined how anxiety is distributed across the two target languages of immigrant children attending a public elementary school in South Korea, who acquire Korean as a second language (L2), the language of schooling, and study English as a third language (L3) taught as a school subject. Fifty-six children in grades 5 and 6 completed a child-adapted anxiety scale based on the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale once for each language, and their responses were analyzed with paired comparisons and item-level mixed-effects models. Contrary to the acquisition-order pattern reported for adult multilinguals, the children were more anxious in Korean than in English, and the difference was concentrated in test anxiety and classroom anxiety rather than in communicative domains. Anxiety correlated moderately across languages, yet children varied widely in which language provoked more anxiety. Background variables showed no reliable moderation. For the children in the present sample, anxiety appeared to attach to the language of academic consequence rather than to the language learned last, an interpretation that awaits testing with direct measures of perceived stakes.