Rethinking foreign language anxiety: psychological insights into gender and skill-specific patterns

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) plays a critical role in learners’ emotional and cognitive experiences, yet gender differences in FLA remain insufficiently understood, with prior research often focusing on general patterns across skills. This study investigates gender-based variations in task-contingent FLA across four language skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—among Chinese undergraduates. The results indicate that men students tended to report higher anxiety, particularly in listening and writing, questioning the common assumption that women learners experience greater FLA and underscoring the task-contingent and gender-filtered nature of FLA. Distinct gender-specific anxiety triggers emerged: for men, anxiety was primarily associated with perceived incompetence and fear of public evaluation, whereas for women, concerns were more closely related to fluency and comprehension difficulties. Notably, women’s relatively higher confidence in speaking appears to reflect not merely lower anxiety, but a more nuanced affective profile in which anxiety may be moderated by greater enjoyment, stronger self-efficacy, or different motivational orientations. By situating gender differences within specific language tasks, this study challenges generalized accounts of FLA and highlights the importance of skill-targeted and gender-sensitive approaches in both research and pedagogical interventions.