What is it about?
Foreign language anxiety can shape how learners feel, participate, and perform in the language classroom. This review examines Han Luo’s book Foreign Language Anxiety: Theory, Methodology, and Practice, which brings together more than four decades of research on this topic. The book explains how language anxiety is understood and measured, what may cause it, how it affects learners, and what teachers can do to reduce it. It also introduces major research methods and emerging directions for studying learners’ emotional experiences.
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Why is it important?
Foreign language anxiety has been studied for decades, but research on the topic is spread across different theories, measures, methods, and classroom contexts. Luo’s book brings these strands together in a structured and accessible way, helping readers understand not only what researchers know about language anxiety, but also how that knowledge is produced and applied. This is particularly useful for language teachers, graduate students, and early-career researchers who want to connect research findings with classroom practice and make informed choices about how anxiety is studied and addressed.
Perspectives
In reviewing this book, I was particularly interested in the way it connects theory, research methods, and classroom practice. I found its methodological guidance especially valuable because it shows readers how research questions about language anxiety can be linked to appropriate analytical approaches. At the same time, the review identifies opportunities for future work, including greater use of physiological measures alongside self-reported anxiety and more attention to differences across target-language contexts. These directions may help researchers capture the dynamic and context-sensitive nature of language anxiety more fully.
Zhupeng Li
University of Connecticut
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Review of Luo (2025): Foreign Language Anxiety: Theory, Methodology, and Practice, Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報) The journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association USA, January 2026, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/csl.00079.li.
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