An Experiment Between CL And Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety In English Intensive Reading Course

This thesis is a project on foreign language classroom anxiety and cooperative learning. Since Krashen put forward the affective filter hypothesis, more and more concern has been paid to the anxiety problem by foreign language educators and researchers at home and aboard. It ranks high among factors influencing language learning and blocking language learning, regardless of whether the setting is informal (learning language outside the classroom) or formal (in the language classroom). Research has shown that language anxiety is a predictor of success in language class and it affects all the three stages (i.e. the input stage, the processing stage, and the output stage)of cognitive processing in second language acquisition or learning. Meanwhile , in recent year , cooperative learning(CL) is also gaining much attention at home and abroad. Researches focusing on the teaching method-cooperative learning also indicate that CL as a classroom procedure can lower anxiety in the language classroom.Despite the rich researches on both foreign language learning anxiety and use of cooperative learning, studies concerning the relationship between the two factors are relatively scarce. This experiment study focuses on this question, aiming to apply one of the most efficient teaching methods-cooperative learning in classroom to reduce foreign language learners' anxiety and improve their language proficiency. So, These issues are the focus of the present study. (1). Are there any students' opinion towards to the designing group activities in the Intensive English Course classroom? (2). Can CL alleviate students' anxiety and make them like English class? (3). Was there a difference in achievement, as measured by the test of TEM-4 2005...