“Silence Is What Causes Me Anxiety”: Nonverbal Cues in the Research of Language Anxiety in the Case of Interpreting Students - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 17, 2 (2025) 180–198

DOI: 10.47745/ausp-2025-0023

Abstract. There has been a remarkable interest in language anxiety (LA) over the last four decades. Particularly foreign language anxiety (FLA) is currently the most widely studied emotion in second language acquisition (SLA) (Gkonou et al. 2017). Anxiety frequently appears in the case of oral tasks; perhaps this is the reason why most researchers tend to focus on the verbal cues of LA and neglect the nonverbal signs. Some claim that 65% to 93% of communication is done nonverbally (Knapp and Hall 2002), and thus it is essential to consider and study these cues in a language anxiety research. The present paper presents nonverbal cues observed during a simultaneous interpreting task from Hungarian to English. Participants (N = 12) were Hungarian-mother-tongue students studying translation and interpreting in BA and MA courses. Silence, pauses, and other body language cues will be observed and analysed based on their recorded interpreting performance, and the results of the follow-up interviews will be presented to support the findings. These findings raise awareness of the importance of acknowledging nonverbal cues of LA in the case of interpreting students.

Keywords: language anxiety, foreign language anxiety, nonverbal cues, interpreting peers, awareness