Talk of María Dolores García-Pastor and Ronan Miller at the snemHE

María Dolores García-Pastor and Ronan Miller delivered an invited talk about anxiety, stammering and English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning at the international congress “Special Needs in a Multimodal World: Research and Practice in Higher Education” (snemHE) 2017. Learners who stammer (LWS) need to be considered students with special educational needs. These researchers show that LWS experience higher levels of anxiety than learners who do not stammer (LWDNS) in reading and speaking. Writing, by contrast, does not produce anxiety in these students in comparison with non-stammering learners, who feel anxious in certain writing tasks. In listening, however, LWS report slightly higher levels of anxiety than LWDNS. One of the conclusions that these researchers draw from the study is that, in spite of the importance of speaking in a foreign language, writing contributes to reduce foreign language anxiety in LWS. Therefore, writing should be encouraged in these learners along with certain writing tasks that do not provoke anxiety in non-stammering learners. Finally, patience, inclusion, understanding, and collaboration are four elements LWS demand from teachers.