This study is prompted by the recent economic situation in Europe, calling for special attention to the relationship between family economic problems and the well-being of adolescents. It seeks to shed more light on the experiencing of financial concerns in adolescents who face the challenge of the foreign language learning process in the context of formal education. The participants of the empirical research were 609 stu-dents from 23 randomly selected classes of the six secondary grammar schools in Opole, southwest Poland. The results prove that financial strain and worries are negatively related to achievement in the field of foreign language learning. However, the social nature of language learning, as well as the students’ personality profi les, attachment patterns or perception of social support in adolescence also play a role.

Learning a foreign language in the context of formal education often imposes on students the management of difficult tasks. This demands an adoption of adequate coping behaviour (achievement vs. avoidance). Easy tasks reduce learning opportunities, while too difficult ones lead to escape-motivated problem behavior. For the purpose of the present research it is proposed that the level of FL task difficulty is related to coping behaviour. The empirical results demonstrate that students who perceive FL tasks as difficult apply more avoidance strategies. Apart from that, students with higher and lower levels of task difficulty use similar amounts of achievement strategies. It follows that the implementation of achievement coping is independent from the level of task difficulty.

Communication apprehension, identifi ed with feelings of tension or embarrassment experienced in social interaction, induces an array of communication avoidance behaviors. Meanwhile ethnocentrism, with its negative view on other cultures, implies a tendency to avoid communication with persons of different cultures, as well. The cumulative effect of both phenomena may induce the catastrophic effects of communication withdrawal, connected with deprecating views on other cultures or their representatives. The uniqueness of the speech event and uncertainty caused by the cultural differences, augmented by the lack of skills and knowledge about the interlocutor, provokes anxiety.

The findings of this empirical study on the relationship between ethnocentrism and communication apprehension taking place in the foreign language classroom demon-strate that students with high levels of communication apprehension display higher levels of ethnocentrism in comparison to their non-apprehensive peers, mainly due to their cognitive, affective, and linguistic barriers.

This paper explores the relationship of self-efficacy to the individual’s academic and social abilities in the process of foreign language learning, analyzing the construct of self-efficacy and its domains (academic, self-regulatory and emotional), and providing insight into the issue of language anxiety, which is specific to foreign language acquisition. The empirical part the research on the relationship between self-efficacy domains and language anxiety, meanwhile, ultimately shows that the modern language cannot be viewed or assessed like any other school subject due to its serious impact on the self of the student.