A Study On Oral Participation Related Classroom Anxiety Of College Students

Recent efforts to improve teaching English as a foreign language challenged researchers and professors to shift their focus from what they teach, to how their students learn. Along with changing instructional methods, professors have placed greater emphasis on learners' individual differences among which learners' affective factors play an important role in leading to variation in language learning. Language anxiety as one of the affective factors, consequently, has drawn more and more concern from researchers and educators. Among them, Amy B. M. Tsui's study--Reticence and Anxiety in Second Language Learning (1996) has received much attention, because she not only has addressed the negative influence of anxiety in foreign langue classroom, but also put forward the causes for the anxiety and corresponding teaching strategies that language teachers believed to be effective to alleviate the foreign language anxiety.In this paper the writer intends to further justify Tsui's study on the causes for foreign language classroom anxiety, reticence and examine the validity of the corresponding teaching strategies from learners' perspective. The subjects in Tsui's research are ESL teachers working in secondary schools in Hong Kong, while the participants in this study are non-English-major students in a private college in mainland of China. Hopefully, this study can provide some practical data and help language teachers become more aware of the affective aspects of learning.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the aim of the study, definitions of language anxiety. The second chapter focuses on the theory foundations of the research and the relationship between classroom anxiety and learners' oral participation willingness. The third chapter presents the purpose, procedures, and instruments of this research. The study reports that students of different anxiety levels show varied degrees of oral participation willingness, and have different preferences for the teaching strategies. This means that the five anxiety-causing factors and the five corresponding teaching strategies proposed by Amy B. M. Tsui only fit some college students to certain extent. The fourth chapter is mainly about the discussion of the research. The last chapter presents the conclusion, proposals and limitations of the study.