Computer anxiety and its relevance to Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

Matsumura, Shoichi & Hann, George. (2004). Anxiety and students' preferred feedback methods in EFL writing. The modern language journal, 88 (3), 403-415, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3588786.

The research questions Matsumura and Hann (2004) ask are (1) “Are students' levels of computer anxiety related to the feedback methods that they select during the revision stage of an [EFL] essay writing assignment?” and (2) “Is the degree of improvement in the students' essay writing related to the feedback methods that they choose in the revision process?” (p. 405). Their hypothesis was that “there would be a difference between highly computer-anxious students and less computer-anxious students in terms of the learning strategy they would choose in order to accomplish a task” and that “high-anxiety students would seek more forms of assistance than their low-anxiety peers if multiple forms of assistance were available” (p. 405), leaving it an open question to what effect the feedback methods would have on the essay revisions. To collect data, Matsumura and Hann used a computer-anxiety questionnaire based on an established computer anxiety rating scale and a formal writing essay task where students had to write a five-paragraph essay, approximately two pages double-spaced, for a grade (pp. 405-406).

The results of the experiment with 207 university-level Japanese students yielded the conclusions that, regarding (1), “highly computer-anxious individuals report a greater tendency toward exhibiting behaviors associated with avoiding computers if circumstances permit” (p. 410), preferring for example one-on-one feedback with the teacher in real-time and that, regarding (2), “[t]he greatest degree of improvement in essay writing occurred among students who posted their drafts online and received both online and face-to-face feedback,” and “[t]he second greatest degree of improvement appeared among the students who posted their drafts in an attempt to receive the instructor's feedback online and who refrained from face-to-face feedback” (p. 411). However, Mastsumura and Hann acknowledge a number of problems with the results, namely that they collected no data with regard face-to-face anxiety to understand its relationship to the essay writing and as a possible confounding factor (p. 412). Also, the people who ultimately did post their essay for review on an online bulletin board were so few (13, in fact, of 207) that it is difficult to generalize about the efficacy of online review of essay writing (p. 412). Another problem was that the three-week span to conduct the research was too short to gauge long-term effects of this form of computer-assisted language learning (pp. 412-413).

The implications of the findings of this research are that multiple means of feedback increase the likelihood of success for an ESL/EFL student regarding particularly an essay writing assignment and that the student's likelihood of success increases when the feedback method permitted fits his or her feedback preference. The former is put in the following way by Matsumura and Hann (2004): “receiving feedback, whether in the form of online indirect feedback or face-to-face feedback, is important and beneficial for students who seek to improve their essay writing” (p. 412). As for the issue of feedback method fitting student feedback style, “the greatest improvement is seen when the feedback method applied in the classroom matches the preferred feedback style of the individual student, that is, when the feedback method used minimizes their levels of anxiety” (p. 412). Without much of an imaginative stretch and with continued results, it is likely that such results generalize or can be duplicated with regard other skills besides writing and other forms of student assessment besides a writing assignment. In such cases, a working hypothesis would be that, in those other and different instances involving different skill sets and tasks, multiple modes of feedback are more likely to generate from an ESL/EFL student a more optimal performance and the more likely the student is permitted to choose his or her feedback method, whether it be a CALL feedback method or not, the more optimal his or her performance will be.