Study On Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety In High Schools And Related Teaching Strategies

With the advent of humanistic psychology, foreign language educators and researchers have been paying more attention to learners'"affective variables"in language learning since the 1960s. They have increasingly recognized affective variables as the significant factors in accounting for the differential success in foreign language learners. Of all these factors, language anxiety is possibly the most pervasive obstruction in foreign language learning.Foreign language learning is a specific situation, which is filled with ego-threats and is prone to cause anxiety. Foreign language anxiety, as one variable of the most important emotional factors, is a combination of many kinds of negative emotional states. Anxiety is likely to hinder the development of language ability and prevent students adopting effective learning practices. However, few studies on language anxiety have been carried out in foreign language classroom. Moreover, much research is needed to investigate the impact of anxiety on high school students'foreign language learning.Aware of this, the author devotes the present study to exploring some questions in this field. The thesis starts by reviewing the previous research on anxiety at home and abroad. On the basis of fruitful western research on foreign language anxiety, an empirical investigation of language anxiety was conducted in a high school. The research methods in this study consisted of both quantitative and qualitative surveys. In the quantitative study, a foreign language anxiety scale designed by Horwitz (1986) was administered to 225 Grade Three high school from Zhangzhai Senior Middle School to measure the students'language anxiety levels. The research mainly focused on four aspects, including students'different levels of language anxiety, the relationship between anxiety and language achievements, potential sources of anxiety, and strategies to alleviate language anxiety. In the qualitative study, the interview provided supplementary data to the results through open questions. The findings reveal that high school students'foreign language learning is more or less interfered by anxiety and there is a negative correlation between language achievements and language anxiety. In addition, a number of learner variables, such as gender, class, self-esteem and personality can contribute to different anxiety levels among students. The research also finds some dominating anxiety-generating factors, such as: students'self-esteem, unscientific beliefs about language learning, instructor-learner interactions. Based on the above findings, some teaching strategies reducing foreign language anxiety are recommended, namely that teachers should adopt humanistic approach and student-centered teaching method, using flexible strategies in classroom to cultivate and develop students'language learning competence and achieve instructional goals catering to the needs of both the society and students. In this case, foreign language learning can be made as enjoyable, useful, and powerful as possible.