The possibility that anxiety interferes with language learning has long interested scholars, language teachers, and language learners themselves. It is intuitive that anxiety would inhibit the learning and/or production of a second language (L2). The important term in the last sentence is ‘anxiety’. The concept of anxiety is itself multi-faceted, and psychologists have differentiated a number of types of anxiety including trait anxiety, state anxiety, achievement anxiety, and facilitative-debilitative anxiety. With such a wide variety of anxiety-types, it is not surprising that early studies on the relationship between ‘anxiety’ and achievement provided mixed and confusing results, and Scovel (1978 – this timeline) rightly noted that anxiety is ‘not a simple, unitary construct that can be comfortably quantified into ‘high’ or ‘low’ amounts’ (p. 137). Scovel did not, however, anticipate the identification in the mid-1980s of a unique form of anxiety that some people experience in response to learning and/or using an L2. Typically referred to as language anxiety or foreign language anxiety (FLA), this anxiety is categorized as a situation-specific anxiety, similar in type to other familiar manifestations of anxiety such as stage fright or test anxiety.

This timeline includes 44 milestones in the development of the language teaching profession's understanding of anxiety reactions in response to L2 learning and use. Many of the early articles address the nature of FLA as contrasted with or related to other anxiety-types (marked by N in the rightmost column of the timeline table below) and the effects of FLA especially on language achievement (E), with later articles more concerned with sources of FLA and its stability or variation under different instructional or socio-cultural conditions (S), the relationship of FLA with other learner factors (LF), anxieties in response to specific aspects of language learning such as listening, reading, or writing (LRW), and instructional strategies to reduce FLA (IS). Since the alleviation of FLA has important implications for language teaching, a number of the citations address more than one theme and are categorized accordingly. I must admit that the selection of articles was more difficult than I expected. Although I did consider citation frequencies, ultimately the list that appears here is heavily influenced by my own judgments of importance, impact, and prominence. Unfortunately, space limitations did not allow me to include many very interesting first-time examinations of FLA in specific learner populations.