An Action Research On The Vocational Students' Anxiety In English Class

The study on the sense of anxiety starts from the 1940s (Cheng, 2004). Dukel made a conclusion after a study on Latin students that good language learners had the stable personality and they did not suffer from anxiety, while those under-performers had the bad temper and they were easy to feel anxious in learning language (Rong, 1998) . In the 1960s, Elaine K. Horwitz et al firstly began to study the language learning anxiety separately and they contributed their "Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale" (Quoted in Ellis, 1999, p. 481) to the following research. From then on, more and more researchers and linguists started to separate anxiety from other components and have done many researches on anxiety which influence language teaching and learning from different aspects and so many good suggestions have been made for the development of linguistic theories and English teaching methods.In this thesis, the writer as a student teacher proposed another aspect to study the vocational students' language learning anxiety by using the theory of action research. The vocational students constitute a large group in China. They enjoy certain skills but they are treated as students with lower English levels than those formal university students. Therefore, there exists the problem how to improve their English levels, and that is also the teachers' responsibility. In order to achieve the above aim, the writer made certain teaching plans hoping to decrease the students' anxiety in her classes. Teachers are treated as the center in the traditional teaching methods and they enjoy more opportunities to act out themselves than the learners during English lessons. Although teachers can perform a lot, here the writer just wants to focus on the following issue: whether the change of treatment or feedback on students' task performance will decrease their anxiety. And the tasks which were used in this thesis are those commonly used in the writer's lessons. Also the tasks will be tested, to some extent, from the point of "decreasing learners' anxiety". In recent years, more and more scholars and English teachers highly value the student-centered teaching method, while here the writer persisted in paying her attention to the teacher-centered teaching method, which is more appropriate and practical in the English teaching situation that the writer faces. Because in the writer's English class, there are more than 80 students, and this situation is quite different from that where there are not more than 30 or 40 students in an English class. So there are some difficulties for the writer to adopt the student-centered teaching method during the English lessons to some extent. While at the same time, the writer keeps an eye on the opinions about learners' sensibilities. Therefore, on the basis of the action research and reflective methods, the writer hopes to help her students reduce their anxiety by changing her teaching behaviors in class instead of students' performances. Just from this standpoint, the writer intends to solve the problems in teaching her vocational students, and also wants to draw some useful conclusions from this study which will benefit other teachers' job and her own professional teaching work in the near future.In this paper, the writer mainly used the action research theories and practical methods, which focus on the description of the natural phenomena. And some of descriptive research methods would also be used here. In the language teaching history, we can see that, at the very beginning teachers were told that grammar-translation is a good teaching method, while they were then told that communicative teaching method is better. Until now, linguists and teachers haven't found "the one true way"-the best way (Strasheim, 1976. Quoted in Hadley, 2004, p86) of language teaching. While, action research reminds teachers of finding the most appropriate way for his or her students in the real context. After all, individual learners accept different teaching methods in line with their own characteristics.The participants in this study are the vocational students, who are taught by the writer herself in Shandong Cinglin Vocational College of Science and Technology. They are majors of construction, and medicine. The writer teaches two classes majoring in construction. In the experiment, the writer changed her manners of treatments or feedbacks when she taught lessons in Class Two, while she did not make any change in teaching Class One. Therefore the students from Class One, who received the normal teaching without teacher's special attentions, played as the control group in this study. The medicine majors were from the cooperative teachers' classes. In this study, the writer gave certain guideline and shared certain suggestions with her cooperative teachers before the study started. At the end of this study, the writer compared the level of the students' anxiety by using the FLCAS questionnaire to see if the students in Class Two have an obviously lower anxiety level. During this study, two students were selected by the teacher to make diaries for recording teachers' performances, and certain means of action research were used, too.After the 10-week study, the writer found out that the changes of the teachers' treatments decreased the students' anxiety. Some insights are drawn from this study such as creating a friendly learning atmosphere to help students make obvious progress in their English learning. And the writer will continue to do further researches and learn from those experienced English teachers in the following days to improve methods for teaching those vocational students.