Language Anxiety And Humor, As A Coping Strategy

Language anxiety is one of the greatest affective obstacles that is hindering language learners from achieving their greatest potential. It has received increasing interest among researchers in recent years. Many researches find that language anxiety has a negative effect on language learning, while some others reported positive effects if the anxiety level is moderate. According to Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, anxiety contributes to an affective filter, which prevents students from receiving input, and then language acquisition fails to progress while low anxiety appears to be conducive to second language acquisition, whether measured as personal or classroom anxiety. Language anxiety may not be alleviated simply through learning strategies. Joint efforts from both the teacher and students are desirable. As far as language teachers are concerned, proper teaching strategies should be employed to reduce students'anxiety level to a certain degree so that the affective filter can be lowered.The focus of my study is on the English classroom anxiety of non-English majors in Zhejiang Forestry University. My purpose is to investigate and compare the perceived levels of anxiety experienced by non-English majors in regular English classrooms that are selected randomly. The main objective of my study is to measure the levels of anxiety ofr those students and how the gender, personality and proficiency in English affect the level of anxiety they experience .Statistical analysis of the data yields the following findings:1) Most of the non-English majors experience language anxiety in English classroom.2) Gender and English proficiency affect anxiety level, but the differences between male and female students, students of high and low proficiency are not very remarkable in statistical sense3) Students'character has a great impact on the anxiety level they suffer: introverted students experience an extremely high anxiety level.4) Compared with fear of negative evaluation and negative attitude towards English, communication (speech) apprehension is a more obvious anxiety-arouser.Due to the complicated nature of language anxiety, the findings are by no means final, but only tentative. They need to be verified by future researches. But they do remind us that teachers should create a harmonious and supportive instructional environment for the students so that they may feel relaxed and confident and may concentrate themselves on learning. Classroom humor is proposed as an effective teaching method for language teachers to employ so as to reduce students'anxiety level. In addition to a literature review of previous studies on humor, I included in my thesis several practical and applicable methods, such as cartoons, music, jokes, riddles, games and role-play that can be used not only in teaching kids, but also in English classroom of college level. Some suggestions are put forward concerning how to make effective humor delivery.