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Two types of biases occur in foreign language learning. The first bias, self-enhancement, refers to students who are unrealistically optimistic about their ability to learn a foreign language. The second bias, self-- derogation, refers to students who have little or no confidence in their performance in foreign language classes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence of these two biases and to compare students with each bias, as well as those with accurate self-perceptions of their foreign language performance, with respect to anxiety and overall academic achievement. Participants were 213 college students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, enrolled in either Spanish, French, or German classes. Self-enhancement bias (47.4%) was more than three times as prevalent as was self-derogation bias (13.,6%). Students with self derogation bias tended to have statistically significantly higher levels of anxiety about foreign languages, whereas those with self-enhancement bias tended to have lower levels of overall academic achievement. These findings indicate that these two biases may have different antecedents.
Research (e.g., Onwuegbuzie, Bailey, & Daley, 2000) has shown that students' expectations of their performance in a foreign language course is an important predictor of their future achievement. Most recently, Onwuegbuzie, Bailey, and Daley (in press) developed via path analysis an Anxiety-Expectation (AEM) Model, in which expectation plays a central role in predicting foreign language achievement. According to this model, expectation and anxiety mediate the relationships between foreign language achievement and other cognitive, personality, and demographic variables. Onwuegbuzie et al. (in press) concluded that the importance of expectation in the AEM model suggests that social cognition theory (Bandura, 1977, 1986) in general, and self-efficacy theory in particular (Bandura, 1977, 1982, 1986, 1997), is pertinent to the foreign language learning process, since expectation is a manifestation of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy theory predicts that one's belief system influences behavioral choices, effort, persistence, and task success in the acquisition of a foreign language (Onwuegbuzie et al., in press).
The findings of Onwuegbuzie et al. (in press) are supported by Ganschow and Sparks (1991), who reported that students' perceptions of the ease of learning foreign languages are the primary indicators of their propensity to experience foreign language learning difficulties. Moreover, according to Krashen (1980), the low expectations of many foreign language students'...