The Influence Of High School Students' Language Anxiety On Oral Production In EFL Classroom

Anxiety is one of the most important affective factors that most pervasively obstructs the FL learning, which attracts more and more academic concerns of foreign or second language teaching worlds, and it varies in listening, speaking, reading and writing. But in the past years of English teaching and learning, people pay more attention in reading and grammar, neglecting listening and speaking. As the increasing require of communicating ability, the students become more stressful because of the conflict of the two. With the higher degree of anxiety, they're always too nervous, worried, or even frightened when speaking. Consequently, many students may experience great obstacles in oral production and are weak at accuracy and fluency of speaking.On the basis of the theory of psychology and second language learning, and language researchers in the study of anxiety, the current study is intended to explore the causes and nature of anxiety, discuss the relationship between language anxiety and language acquisition and give a definition of language anxiety. By analyzing the characteristics of oral production, the author points out the possibility of common existence of intense language anxiety in EFL classroom, and the necessity of reducing the anxiety. The paper holds the hypothesis that language anxiety of High School Students in EFL classroom is negatively correlated to their oral production. Research methods such as scaling (the modified Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale is used), open-ended questionnaire and individual interview are used to prove the above-mentioned hypothesis iand help to get the students' information on the sources of anxiety, their advice on how to reduce their language anxiety and the feedback of them after a certain means of reducing anxiety is adopted. The related data shows that the hypothesis is true. Namely, the higher the students' language anxiety is, the lower their oral production level is. In other words, they are negatively correlated. From the open-ended questionnaire and individual interview, the writer sought out and discussed the sources causing language anxiety. They are mainly as follows: negative personality, low self-confidence, too difficult or complex topics, fear of negative evaluation and the tense relationship between teachers and students.The writer then puts forward five principles for reducing anxiety and workableproposals, which eventually help students reduce their language anxiety and improve their ability of oral production. Then the paper introduces an experiment made deliberately on some students to reduce language anxiety, which shows that five principles do well.The results of the experiments enlightened us that teachers should pay more attention to students' language anxiety in EFL classroom, which does much harm to their performance in oral production, realize its sources and adopt certain strategies to create a relaxed classroom atmosphere in order to reduce language anxiety and improve the accuracy and fluency of their oral production. At the end of this paper, the limitations of the present study and recommendation for the future research are presented.