Motivation And Anxiety In Foreign Language Learning And Teaching

In foreign language teaching practice, affective factors have frequently been overlooked. The development of emotion is forced to give way to that of knowledge and intelligence. More importance has been attached to the development of cognitive ability rather than emotional influence. In recent years, an increasing number of foreign teachers and researchers have carried out studies on affective factors from various perspectives. As two major emotional factors, motivation and anxiety have gradually aroused worldwide interest. This thesis is based on the two factors, centering on college English teaching practice and targeting at the change of the present time-consuming yet inefficient teaching practice.Motivation is actually a cluster of factors that "energize behavior and give it direction". In the early work of Gardner and Lambert (1972), motivation was seen to be divided into two very general orientations: integrative and instrumental. Motivation can also be divided into intrinsic and extrinsic. Facilitating as extrinsic motivation is, intrinsic motivation is far more important. Since 1990s, second language researchers have studied second language motivation from multi-perspectives as in biology, behaviorism, cognition and sociology. Some discuss the components of motivation; others carry out experiment to explore the deep motivational structure. Recently, Chinese scholars also begin to research in college students' learning motivation.Language anxiety ranks high among factors influencing language learning. Anxiety can be attributed to many causes, and different teaching methods might cause different degree of anxiety. In the last two decades, the importance of anxiety in language learning has led to significant research and discussion on the topic. Some hold that facilitating anxiety is helpful to enhance learning effect; however, many researchers and teachers state that anxiety is an affective filter factor which hinders the enhancement of language capacity. Therefore, the negative effect is much larger than the positive. In this case, all foreign language teachers are faced with the challenge in the classroom context as to how to prevent the anxiety-inducing situation and minimize the debilitating anxiety among the students.Studies on motivation and anxiety involve both theoretical explorations and experimental evidence. Chapter four in this thesis studies the overseas academic fruitVIon this topic. It has been a thought-provoking question whether overseas theories apply to Chinese context. In Chapter five, by employing two internationally well-known scales, I carried out a survey on the correlation between Chinese college students' foreign language learning motivation/anxiety and learning achievement.True that motivation and anxiety are only two aspects of affective factors, and affective factors itself cannot solve all the problems in foreign language learning, which is achieved mainly through cognitive process. However, it is safe to arrive at the conclusion that, by such means as improving teaching methods, foreign language teaching and learning can be bettered if the teacher can enhance the motivation and sense of achievement among students and minimize the debilitating anxiety.