Reducing Students' Anxiety With Recording In Oral English Class

Anxiety in language classroom is found to be one of the affective factors that most pervasively obstruct the learning process. And anxiety students feel in oral English class is even more overwhelming which makes speaking in English classroom a forbidding experience for many students.This dissertation proposes that in addition to other activities, students use recording in their speaking practices. The purpose is to reduce anxiety involved therein and meanwhile promote individual talking time in speaking practices.Reported in this dissertation is a study the author carried out to test whether recording is capable of reducing anxiety students feel in oral English class. It also examined the impact that a classroom with reduced anxiety has on the development of speaking proficiency, specifically fluency and pronunciation of stress.Two groups of students were chosen from two classes the author was teaching, with thirty students from each class. Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and Foreign Service Institute (FSI) model of speaking proficiency test were conducted to make sure participants in both groups were on equal terms when treatment, i.e., recording, began. Independent sample t-tests between the two groups, i.e., the experimental group and the control group, were conducted to further guarantee that there was no significant difference between the two groups.After twelve weeks of treatment, an identical test of FLCAS and speaking proficiency was given to assess the impact recording had had on the subjects' anxiety and the learning outcome.Results from the study revealed the difference in subjects' anxiety in oral English class between the control group and the experimental group was significant (t = 1.975 P < .05), which demonstrated that recording did help to reduce anxiety in oral English class. Yet only partial significance was observed in the results of the speaking proficiency test, in that improvement in fluency was extremely significant, whereas the progress regarding the pronunciation of stress was not as indicative.