**2. Literature review**

### **2.1 Foreign language anxiety**

Anxiety is the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the automatic nervous system [18]. Such emotion also exists in SL/FL learning and is known as foreign language anxiety (FLA) [2, 19]. In early stages of FLA research, inconsistent findings were revealed due to different definitions and measurements used by researchers [20]. Subsequently, scholars realized the importance of specifying the type of anxiety in research. Thereafter, [2] proposed the theory of foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA). As explained in this theory, FLCA is a specific type of FLA and refers to the negative emotions arising from the teaching and learning of a SL/FL in classrooms. It covers three dimensions: speech apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test anxiety. To measure FLCA, [2] designed the 33-item 5-point Likert Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), which then has been widely utilized in empirical studies in various bilingual/multilingual learners though the FLCAS primarily measures speaking anxiety [3, 9, 21–25]. These studies generally show that anxiety exists in almost all aspects of SL/FL learning, such as in speaking, reading, listening, writing, and translation, and negatively affects SL/FL learning outcomes [8, 26–32]. They also indicate that speaking is the most anxiety-provoking activity and the greatest source of anxiety in language classrooms [23, 33, 34], and that speaking anxiety is strongly negatively correlated with oral performance in a SL/FL and changes as the learning context changes [6–9, 11, 34]. For example, in [6], three teachers and eighty-eight students from four intact classes in a Thai university voiced their perceptions of speaking anxiety in English classrooms via videotaped interviews. The results corroborated the existence of speaking anxiety

#### *The Interaction of Expectancy-Value Beliefs and Anxiety in Learning Academic Oral English… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98181*

among bilingual learners in classrooms, especially when accompanied by tests, which hindered students' English performance to varying degrees. The study attributed students' speaking anxiety to their lack of self-confidence, low English proficiency, as well as lagging motivation in using English. Qualitative studies even reveal that students with high anxiety may speak with trembling voices, forget what they know, and do not know what to say, suffering from negative impacts rendered by anxiety to their performance and learning of the SL/FL [10, 35, 36].

As English becomes the lingua franca of the world, it also becomes a dominant language in academia. Naturally, what students of higher education desire to be proficient in is not only speaking English for general purposes but also speaking English for academic purposes. This is especially so for postgraduate students who are often more frequently involved in academic activities such as classroom discussions, conference presentations, seminar presentations and oral research proposal defenses [37]. Consequently, their academic oral communication (AOC) ability has become an increasingly crucial measure of their overall academic performance [38]. Still, AOC is far more anxiety-provoking and challenging since it requires both the knowledge of English and research [5, 39–41]. Moreover, fewer chances of practicing AOC also add to the anxiety experienced by postgraduate ESL/EFL (English as a second/foreign language) students. Unfortunately, little research on AOC anxiety is available in the current literature [12].

#### **2.2 Expectancy-value beliefs**

As individuals make efforts to learn a SL/FL to become bilingual/multilingual because of interest and/or the desire to seek satisfaction from the learning experience, learner motivation is another heating research topic during the recent 50 years [42, 43]. Along with this, a number of motivation theories have been developed, such as the socio-educational theory [43], the social cognitive theory [44], the L2 motivational self-system [45], the self-determination theory [46], the self-efficacy theory [47], and the expectancy-value theory [48], all of which pinpoint the importance of motivation in SL/FL learning and elucidate factors affecting this motivation. These ideas are generally supported by empirical studies [16, 42, 49–51], which also reveal that language learning motivation is dynamic and interacts with many other factors to have a joint impact on SL/FL learning.

Among these theories, an influential yet not much researched one is the expectancy-value theory (EVT) pioneered by [52] and further elaborated by [48]. This theory emphasizes the multiplicative roles of expectancy and value beliefs in predicting learners' achievement-related activities, such as choices, effort, persistence and performance [17, 53, 54]. According to this theory, 'expectancy' and 'values' specify the strength of learners' achievement motive. 'Expectancy' or 'expectancy for success' concerns an individual's competence beliefs about achieving tasks either immediately or in the future [55], which is closely related to the individual's real life experience of success or failure from task completion. 'Value' or 'subjective task value' deals with learners' impetus and rationale for choosing and doing a certain task or activity [55], which is further divided into four separate facets: attainment value (the importance of doing well in a task), intrinsic value (the enjoyment from completing a task or participating in an activity with interest), utility value (the usefulness of a task in relation to learners' present and future goals) and cost value (the estimated amount of effort, mostly negative, in doing a task). It is assumed that these beliefs vary according to time, task, context and individual learner.

To explore learners' expectancy-value beliefs, several instruments have been developed, such as the Self-Description Questionnaire [56], the EVT model [48] and the Expectancy-Value Beliefs Inventory [17]. Studies applying these

instruments generally show that expectancy has a more long-lasting effect on academic achievement or performance while task values have a stronger connection in predicting academic efforts and the choice of self-regulation strategies [13, 15, 17, 57]. They also demonstrate a strong relevance of expectancy-value beliefs to learner emotions because of its emphasis on the multiplicative effects of learner beliefs and subjective value appraisals on achievement motives [58–60]. For example, [49] collected data from 631 Chinese primary school students aged 9 to 12. They found that expectancy and value components varied markedly with participant characteristics: motivation declined with age and girls were more motivated and had higher values than boys. They also found that expectancy was a stronger predictor for achievement than value components across all ages and for both genders. Xu [60] investigated the levels of expectancy, importance (attainment value), interest (intrinsic value), listening anxiety, listening metacognitive awareness, and listening test scores of 548 Chinese first-year undergraduate students and the interactive effects of these variables by structural equation modeling. He found that learners' FLA was negatively correlated with their expectancy and intrinsic value but positively connected with attainment value. The researcher proposed to enhance learners' expectancy beliefs and intrinsic value and mitigate anxiety to improve their listening competence.
