English Language Anxiety and Information Avoidance: A Study of Undergraduate Students in Nigerian University Libraries

Research on foreign language anxiety has mostly been conducted in the classroom, while studies on library anxiety have paid little attention to the language of library services. This qualitative study therefore investigated how English language anxiety relates to the information seeking of undergraduates in Nigerian university libraries, drawing on the foreign language anxiety framework and the theory of investment. Through purposive sampling, 28 undergraduates whose first language was a Nigerian indigenous language and who had used the library that year, and 8 academic librarians, were selected from three federal universities in southern Nigeria. Their semi-structured interviews were analysed through a six-phase codebook thematic analysis, with two researchers coding independently. The study distinguishes the deliberate ignoring of available and useful information (information avoidance) from avoiding librarians while seeking information elsewhere. Four themes emerged: linguistic self doubt and reluctance to seek help, code switching as a coping mechanism, negotiation of identity in English-dominant library spaces, and the librarian as a linguistic gatekeeper. Participants linked anxiety over English to not seeking support from librarians and, sometimes, to purposely restricting their use of helpful library resources. The results rest on self-reported data from three universities in one region and cannot be generalised to all Nigerian students. The study extends language anxiety and investment theory to the library, treating language as a dimension of library anxiety. It points to multilingual communication policies, training for librarians in responding to code switching, user education that normalises help seeking, and virtual reference and peer support via text.