[3] Additionally, it has a variety of detrimental effects on foreign language performance, but both the student and the teacher can adopt strategies to minimize the anxiety.
[5][6][7][8] The unrest and worry come due to the fact that the native (Catalan) speakers foresee a connection of threats and verbal aggressions that may experience only because of using their language in bigger or touristic cities such as Barcelona, València, Eivissa or Perpinyà.
[15] Sparks and Ganschow[16] draw attention to the fact that anxiety could result in or cause poor language learning.
[14] Anxious learners suffer detrimental effects during spontaneous speaking activities in performance, affective reactions and their overall attitudes towards learning their target second language.
[20] Furthermore, they may lack confidence, be less able to self-edit and identify language errors and more likely to employ avoidance strategies such as skipping class.
These are: "experienced performance difficulty, face threat and identity conflict—all of which mediate the relationship between personal and contextual variables and the negative and positive emotions an individual experiences while code-switching".
[clarification needed] In that sense, although code-switching results from foreign language anxiety, it is more often caused by external circumstances than by internal mental change.
It investigates participants' communication apprehension, test-anxiety and fear of negative evaluation and focuses on speaking in a classroom context.
[4][19] Support groups can also be a useful tool, as well as other forms of collaboration among peers at a similar level of experience with the language.
[4] Teachers can also adopt strategies and teaching methods that can help prevent foreign language anxiety to their students.
Teaching-based strategies for reducing foreign language anxiety involve fostering a comfortable and relaxed classroom environment in which the teacher is supportive and friendly.
[4] One study recommends teaching songs in the classroom as a specific methodological strategy that can improve academic performance, which in turn decreases the anxiety level of students as they become more comfortable and proficient in the language.
[30] In the 1990s, the challenge was a clear categorization of grammatical or sociolinguistic constraints on code-switching caused by foreign language anxiety and to determine how bilinguals produce different code-mixed patterns.
Previously, most researches focused more upon syntactic aspects on code-switching; in other words, psychological elements were completely ignored.