Foreign Language Apprehension and Interview Success

A job interview (or employment interview) is a common hiring method involving a conversation between a job applicant (interviewee) and a representative of an employer (interviewer) which is conducted to assess and evaluate the suitability of the applicant for the job (Dipboye, Macan and Shahani-Denning 2012). Depending on the company profile, the type of position and the job requirements, applicants are assessed and evaluated by companies in various dimensions ranging from presentability to academic efficiency. Although the criteria of companies vary a lot, all interviews engender a phenomenon called interview anxiety. It is generally the sum of annoying and unpleasant feelings before or during a job interview (McCarthy and Goffin 2004) due to reasons such as lack of control during interviews (Jones and Pinkney 1989) or being evaluated by a stranger in an interactional environment (Ayres et al. 1998). Common symptoms of interview anxiety manifest in long and frequent pauses while talking, slow speech or licking lips (Feiler and Powell 2016). Besides the regular procedures of employment interviews, global companies operating in non-English-speaking countries also assess the English language competency of the applicants during interviews. These companies value proficiency in English and it is a vital prerequisite of international communication for these types of companies. Foreign language (mostly English) assessment commonly focuses on the oral skills of the applicants and how good they are at communicating in the English language. The inclusion of this evaluation in job interviews certainly has merit; however, it also has the potential to increase the anxiety experienced during interviews due to the phenomenon called foreign language anxiety (FLA). Anxiety, in general, is defined as a common subjective feeling of unease, discomfort, and worry often accompanied by some physiological symptoms. FLA refers to the specific type of anxiety that emerges in a foreign language context (MacIntyre 1999). FLA causes low foreign language performance causing anxious individuals to commit various linguistic and phonological errors. Considering that employment interviews are already anxiety-provoking processes, this study hypothesizes that the inclusion of foreign language assessment during interviews elevates anxiety due to FLA, and aims to examine how this experience affects employment interview success.