An Empirical Study On The Alleviation Of English Majors' Oral English Classroom Anxiety By "Improving Speaking By Writing" Approach

At present, one problem exsiting in teaching and learning oral English is that painsare greater than gains. A great number of students spend so much time learning andpracticing oral English, but most of them can't use it freely, which is particularly truefor the English major students. As a result, the author intends to solve this problem bytaking a new approach——"Improving Speaking by Writing" Approach. Thisapproach combines writing with speaking, which makes the students do strongspadework for speaking by practicing writing. Therefore, they can achieve the aim ofimproving their speaking. After a period of time of practicing writing, the grammarstructures they have learned, including tenses, voices, sentence patterns, words, phrasesand so on will also be strengthened when they practice oral English.The present study reviews the relevant studies on foreign language learninganxiety, input and output theory and Levelt's model for oral production, and attempts todiscover the cognitive reason which causes the foreign language classroom anxiety offirst-year English major students and impedes their oral proficiency. The present study,from a theoretical point of view, attempts to discuss whether the new approach——"Improving Speaking by Writing" Approach can relieve the oral English classroomanxiety and enhance the ability of English speaking. The study also investigates oralEnglish classroom anxiety level of first-year English major students and the effects of"Improving Speaking by Writing" Approach on lowering oral English classroomanxiety and enhancing oral proficiency.Sixty-seven freshmen English majors from two classes, at Nanchang HangkongUniversity, participated in the study. Thirty-four of them formed the Experimental class,given "Improving Speaking by Writing" Approach. The other thirty-three studentsserved as the Control class, receiving traditional oral lessons. All the other conditions ofthese two groups were controlled: the same teacher, teaching materials and length ofclass time. The data was collected from the pre-oral-test and the post-oral-test, pre-FLCAS-questionnaire and post-FLCAS-questionnaire and an interview conducted tosix students in the experiment class at the end of semester. The questionnaire was Foreign language classroom anxiety scale designed by Howitz (1986), which attemptedto test the students'anxiety level. The author attempted to test the efficiency of"Improving Speaking by Writing" Approach through the analysis of students' oralclassroom anxiety level from the two questionnaires, statistic analysis of students'scores from the pre-oral-test and the post-oral-test, and an interview of students' attitudetoward new approach.The study has yielded several findings:⑴most of the subjects experienced higheroral English classroom anxiety before the introduction of the new approach.⑵there isa close negative correlation between oral English classroom anxiety and achievementon spoken English test. That means the higher the students experienced oral Englishclassroom anxiety, the lower their spoken English test scores, and vice versa.⑶first-year English majors' oral English classroom anxiety level under the "ImprovingSpeaking by Writing" Approach became lower than under that of the traditionalteaching circumstances.⑷first-year English majors oral proficiency under the "FromWriting to Speaking" teaching circumstances were much more productive than underthat of the traditional teaching circumstances. Thus, "Improving Speaking by Writing"Approach may be more effective on the changing of oral class anxiety level andenhancing the students' oral proficiency.