| Anxiety is one of the most important affective variables that prevails in Foreign Language learning and it attracts more and more academic concerns of foreign or second language teaching worlds. Learners'participation which is one of the important facts of classroom interaction is also considered as a critical means of language output. Then what's the relationship between these two variables? And what kind of impacts do they exert on the language learning process? By consulting the theory of psychology and second language learning, and language researchers in the study of anxiety, and by using Horwitz's Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and Questionnaire of Classroom Participation, the study explores the characteristics of language anxiety, the classroom participation frequency and participation ways, and the correlation of language anxiety level and classroom participation. The results of the study reveal that:1) The students show media anxiety level in English classroom learning, especially in speaking. The English majors are at a media anxiety level in communication anxiety, anxiety of communicating with native speaker, fear of lagging behind others and fear of negative evaluation. The anxiety level of negative feeling towards English lecture and tests anxiety is low. There exists a significant difference of anxiety level among students.2) Though the participation frequency level of English majors is media, there do exist some students who seldom participate in classroom activities. In individual work, students are inclined to participate in classroom activities in a passive way. In pair work and group work, the participation frequency level of performing stage is lower than preparing stage, and the participation frequency of teacher-led whole-classroom activities is high.3) There exists a negative correlation between foreign language anxiety and students'participation frequency level. The higher the anxiety level, the lower the participation frequency. Anxiety level also determines the participation ways. Low anxiety students inclined to be more active in answering teachers'questions while high anxiety students tend to be more passive in classroom activities. Low anxiety students participate more often in performing stage than high anxiety students. But there are some exceptions whose anxiety level is too low to stimulate them to take participation in the classroom activities.On the basis of the findings, the author comes up with some implications for reducing language anxiety and improving English classroom teaching and leaning. At the end of this paper, the limitations of the study and suggestions for the future research are presented. |
