A Comparison Study Of Chinese Classroom Anxiety And Participation In 5 Typical Interaction Activities

Since 1970's, the focus of the second language teaching research has turned to student-centered with the development of the cognitive psychology and humanism. Meanwhile observing the language classroom reality is becoming popular in the worldwide second language teaching field. With the development of the classroom interaction theory and communicative teaching method, more and more Chinese teacher start to use all kinds of activities in the spoken Chinese class, in which 5 of them are most often used: questionnaires, presentation & prepared talks, discussion & debate, acting from a script and simulation & role-play. However in the process of these activities, there is still a gap between the teacher' s teaching and learners' participating. Is it because of the problem with the teacher, or the limitation of the activities themselves, or the effect from the individual differences?The affective filter hypothesis suggests that the affection of the learners is the key factor which has an important effect on the second language learning. In all the affective factors, anxiety is the main barrier to the high level of foreign language. Classroom interaction hypothesis believes that learners only learned foreign language in two-way communication, so that the interactive environment is an important condition for learning a second language. It is known that comprehensive output would improve the learning as well as comprehensive input. Therefore the classroom participation of learners is an important part of the classroom interaction. So, in those 5 often used activities, how is the classroom anxiety? Do they all provide the teacher and the students the effective interaction? Do they all increase the classroom participation? Those questions are all worth answering. There are quite a few researches on the language classroom anxiety and participation, but most of them are separate study. Whereas is there any correlations between them? The thesis is also trying to find the answer to it.This thesis is a study on the 5 classroom activities. Throughout the analysis of data and the review of the process of those activities, I am trying to compare them to each other. From the analysis and the discussion, I reach to conclusion that (1) the level of anxiety is a very important factor having a great effect on the classroom participation. The moderate anxiety can improve the participation while the low or high level will decrease the participation. (2) the 5 activities mention above are all the effective ones, in which the learners have moderate anxiety and high participation. (3) there are some difference of classroom anxiety and participation between the activities. Discussion & debate and role-play are the ones in which the anxiety is low while the participation is high. Learners have different anxiety level in questionnaire and it causes the different means of participation. In presentation and acting from a script, the anxiety is high and the participation is low. (4) there are individual difference in the classroom anxiety and participation in all 5 classroom activities.Also we got some suggestion for the Chinese teachers: (1) to use all kinds of different activities to create a good classroom environment with moderate anxiety and high participation. (2) to arrange the classroom activities according to the content of the text. (3) to pay more attention to the individual difference of the learners.