The Relationship Between Anxiety And Classroom Extensive Reading Activity And Its Effect On L2 Reading Development

Language teaching and learning has experienced the process of development from connection theory through cognitive theory to humanistic theory till now. At present, the focus of the teaching and learning has converted from the teacher and language material to the students—the learners. This change happens because it is generally considered that the cognitive aspects for the majority of learners are basically not significantly different. What leads to the difference of learning achievement could be attributed to the individual factors of the learners such as the learners' beliefs about language learning, their affective states and various general factors including learning style, motivation, personality, learning strategies and the like.Among these factors, the affective states of the learner are obviously of crucial importance in accounting for individual differences in learning outcomes because the affective states of the learners tend to be changeable, affecting not only the overall language learning progress but also particular learning activities on a day-by-day and even moment-to-moment basis.Among the affective factors, language anxiety is generally regarded as one of the most important factors that hinders the language learning process and inhibits the learners' performance and learning initiatives. Researches have investigated two main questions: what causes state anxiety or situation anxiety and what effect anxiety has on learning. Most of the researches have been concentrated on the effect of anxiety on language learning and its influence on the four aspects of language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing, especially the first two. A comparatively large space is left to researches as to how to reduce or moderate language anxiety at an appropriate degree to improve the learners' language proficiency concerning the four skills of a language.The humanistic approach of language learning suggests the cooperative learning as a solution, group activity, for instance, and has an affective theory to be its basis. Despite of this, it seems that very few experiments have been found to be carried out to check its applicability and feasibility. The present research will make a very small exploration into the language anxiety and check whether the cooperative learning can serve to play a role in reducing or moderating learners' English extensive reading anxiety in classroom, with an aim to improve the learners' reading proficiency. It seeks to explore the following two questions:1) What kinds of anxieties (including their degrees) mainly influence the students' classroom extensive reading activities? And how do they affect the students in their reading?2) Can group activities help the students perform more effectively by reducing or moderating language anxieties in classroom reading activities to improve their reading achievement at a faster rate?The experiment adopts the form of parallel research between the control group and the experiment group. The first step is to measure the subjects' level of anxiety and their reading proficiency before the experiment; then during the experiment, the teacher's observation in the classroom and the diary by the subjects about every two weeks are under way. Accordingly, the teacher will adapt his way of teaching. At the end of the experiment, an anxiety test after the experiment and a posttest of English reading are taken by the subjects once again to check the effect of the treatment. The results of the two tests are compared with statistical tools to check the effectiveness of the experiment, i.e. the effect of the group activities.The research result indicates that English reading anxiety has a negatively medium correlation with English reading proficiency. But with regard to reducing or moderating the English reading anxiety to improve the subjects' reading proficiency, the experiment is not a great success on the whole. But the group activities did have some effect. If a longer time is covered, it can be a success. The result of the experiment can be attributed to several causes concerning different aspects of the experiment such as the number of subjects, the subjects' present reading proficiency, the teacher factors, the schooling environment, the practical factors of the experiment and other factors related to language learning.Finally, the thesis suggests that in the future research, a bigger sample of subjects should be included, a longer time be covered, other affective factors be considered, the teacher adapts to be more facilitative to learning in the classroom.