Teachers' Role In Foreign Language Anxiety

Anxiety is a complicated psychological phenomenon in foreign language learning process. Compared with all those affective elements, anxiety is, relatively speaking, one of the most prominent and powerful factors that exert great influence on the process of foreign language learning. In other words, anxiety, especially intense anxiety, is most likely to be the obstacle in the process of language learning. Therefore, how to alleviate learning anxiety and promote learners'foreign language learning aptitude appears to be an urgent and important issue in the EFL teaching context. Definitely, this poses a great challenge to foreign language teachers. On the other hand, teachers will unmistakably influence the effectiveness of foreign language learning, which constitutes another major factor of foreign language learning anxiety. In this case, what kind of roles a teacher should perform, and what particular strategies he or she could employ determines whether or not a learner can learn a foreign language with low level of anxiety.With the help of a specially designed questionnaire, this research tests the level of foreign language anxiety of 67 first year English majors of Suzhou Vocational College from three aspects of foreign language anxiety, i.e., speech reception anxiety, speech production anxiety and cross-cultural communication anxiety. Within the framework of social constructivist model and on the basis of the statistical results, this thesis endeavors to analyze the teachers'role in alleviating learners'language anxiety. Meanwhile, by comparing with the common practices, this author suggests several strategies that may free learners from severe language anxiety so as to promote more effective foreign language teaching and learning.