A Study Of Classroom Oral English Anxiety Of Non-English Majors

The research focus on second language acquisition has been transferred from"how to teach"to"how to learn"since the 1970's. Language researchers begin to attach importance to the research on individual learner differences. They attach more significance to learners'affective sides in addition to their cognitive sides in language learning. Anxiety is probably one of the most affective variables that impede language learning. And foreign language learning is particularly anxiety-provoking. It is not a just case of general classroom anxiety being transferred to the foreign language learning but a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning process.Based on Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis and Horwitz et al's Construct of Foreign Language Anxiety, this study investigated the degree of the classroom anxiety of the Chinese university students of non-English majors. The study combines both quantitative and qualitative analyses, using two questionnaires and individual interviews, to investigate the level of speech anxiety of college students in English class. The results of the present study showed that most college students'classroom oral anxiety was rather pervasive. Except for grade difference, the other two, gender and regional differences in anxiety level are significant. As far as the study is concerned, the main sources of students'speech anxiety are not only due to the learners themselves but also to the language learning experience including the instructor and the methodology, involving lack of self-confident, limited English proficiency, unfamiliar with the topic, teaching materials, classmates and teachers'attitude to their performance, teachers'speech and action, classroom atmosphere and so on.Based on the results of this research, suggestions for pedagogical practice are provided to both teachers and students to help alleviate the speech anxiety. For teachers, it is suggested that it is necessary and feasible to decrease the students'anxiety in classroom English teaching if individual differences are paid attention to, if the decrease of students'anxiety is treated as one of the teaching targets, and if a lively classroom atmosphere is created with students'self-confidence built. For students, it is suggested that if students could abandon all false beliefs about EFL learning, if they could take part in the foreign language learning actively and voluntarily, and if they could try to communicate with both teachers and parents well, the speech anxiety will be lessened gradually.