A Study On Effects Of Communicative Approach To Lowering Senior High School Students' Classroom Anxiety In English Oral Performance

Foreign language learning is a complex task, which can be associated with feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, and apprehension. Foreign Language Anxiety is recognized as an affective factor in foreign language learning. Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1991) viewed foreign language anxiety as"a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process"(in Horwitz & Young, 1991). FLA itself can have contradictory effects on language learning, and as such literature mentions both debilitating and facilitating types of anxiety, where debilitating anxiety poses an obstacle to language learning, whereas facilitating anxiety facilitates or fosters it. Although both types exist, this study concentrates on the former. That is, foreign language anxiety has a debilitating effect on the oral performance of senior students of English as a second language.This article describes a research project concerning the foreign language classroom anxiety and its debilitating influence to oral performance of senior students, and investigated language anxiety level of senior English learners, and studied the effects of communicative approach on lowering English language speaking anxiety as experienced by high school students. The participants in this study were 68 students of Senior Grade One in High School. Participants were given the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz) to investigate their foreign language anxiety in English learning. Based on their scores in the questionnaires, 8 participants who got higher scores were selected to conduct interviews and experiment. These interviews and experiments were taken notes. The results indicated that senior students showed different degrees of language speaking anxiety in communicative activities. The lower oral ability they have, the higher speaking anxiety they show. Moreover, several sources of language anxiety and anxious-provoking situations were discussed in this study, which deepened our understanding of foreign language anxiety and facilitated our efforts to reduce it. After communicative approach was applied in oral communication teaching, the students with high anxiety showed lower language speaking anxiety than that before, which proved that the Communicative Approach was effective to lower speaking anxiety.