The Effectiveness Of Anchoerd Instruction On Alleviating Vocational College Students’ Anxiety In English Classroom

As a common cognitive activity for human beings, language learning process is inevitablyinfluenced by the affective factors. Among all of the affective elements, anxiety is considered tobe one of the most critical variables. And in the whole process of foreign language learning,foreign language anxiety has much influence on the learning results.The vocational education account for a large part of the higher educational system. In thesevocational schools, English is a compulsory subject. However, the vocational college Students’English proficiency is poor, and most of them meet much more difficulties in English learning,so they show little interest and much anxiety in English learning. These pressures and anxietylead to their bad performance in English classroom, and the poor achievements in English. Oneof the contributing factors for this phenomenon is the traditional teaching model. The teacherexplains the words and grammatical structures, while the students just listen and recite passively.In order to improve the current situation, it is necessary for us to change the traditional teachingmodel, changing from the “teacher-centered” to the “students-centered” instruction. As one ofthe important constructivist instructional strategies, the anchored instruction can promote thestudents’ ability by insisting on the idea of “students-centered”, taking the instructional elements,procedures and teaching design into the fullest consideration, and designing the learningenvironment and self-evaluation.Based on the current English learning conditions in vocational schools, the author adoptedthe way of the empirical study. The experiment was conducted in Shandong Institute of TradeUnion for a semester. The subjects are non-English-major freshmen from two classes. Class onewas randomly selected as the experimental group. The teacher adopted the anchored instructionduring the teaching procedure. In a relatively authentic teaching environment, the studentsachieved the learning goal through independent learning and cooperative learning. Class two wasassigned as the control group, who were taught with the traditional teaching method. The teacherplayed the dominant role in the class. The author was intended to explore two questions:1. Cananchored instruction alleviate the students’ anxiety in the English classroom?2. Can anchoredinstruction promote the students’ English proficiency? Such instruments as the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) designed by Horwits (1986), the PETS-3test papers, andSPSS V17.0are adopted in the teaching experiment.After a semester’s empirical study, in the experimental class which are taught by theanchored instruction, the students’ English classroom anxiety has been alleviated a lot. As theystudy in a relaxing environment, they make much progress in their English achievements.However, in the control class, both the students’ English classroom anxiety and their Englishgrade change a little. The experiment proves that the application of anchored instruction canalleviate the vocational students’ anxiety level in the English classroom, and then it can improvethe students’ English proficiency.Taking these studies into consideration, two objectives are expected to be achieved: Tobegin with, in the theoretical field, the author is aimed to enrich the studies on anchoredinstruction and the researches on the students’ foreign language anxiety, and put forward somesuggestions for further researches. Additionally, in practice, through the experiment, the authorgives some suggestions, hoping the anchored instruction can be better employed in vocationalschools to alleviate the vocational students’ anxiety level in the English classroom and improvetheir English proficiency.