A Study Of Multimedia-assisted Situational Teaching And Vocational College Students’ Anxiety In English Classroom

English is an important course required for students among the curriculum offered inhigher vocational colleges. However, the English teaching situation in higher vocational collegesis dissatisfactory. On one hand, students are under big mental pressure in English class, whichmakes them feel insecure, anxious and less positive. Thus English becomes one of the mostunwelcome subjects for students. On the other hand, cognitive process is separated fromemotional process in higher vocational English teaching and the interaction between students andteachers is too little to be effective. Students participate in English class passively and theirEnglish proficiency is relatively low.Situational teaching refers to a kind of teaching method, which has the students taught andeducated in a pleasant atmosphere by creating vivid and real environments according to theteaching content. This study applies multimedia-assisted situational teaching to the highervocational English class to address the three problems below:(1) whether the application ofmultimedia-assisted situational teaching would ease the English classroom anxiety of the highervocational college students;(2) whether the application of multimedia-assisted situationalteaching would improve English proficiency of the higher vocational college students; and (3)the relationship between the students’ English classroom anxiety level and their Englishproficiency.The subjects of this study are76students of the two non-English-major classes of YishuiBranch, Linyi University: the experimental group and the control group. Research instrumentsare the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), English application ability test forhigher vocational colleges in Shandong and the statistical software SPSS19.0. Results of the10-week teaching experiment show that the two variables—anxiety index and English proficiencyof the experimental group which had received multimedia-assisted situational teaching changedsignificantly after the experiment. Students of the experimental group have had their anxietyindex obviously lowered and their English performance highly improved. In contrast, the twovariables of the control group did not change significantly after the experiment: the anxiety indexin the post-test paralleled the pre-test one, and the English proficiency in the post-test wasslightly higher than that in the pre-test. The bivariate correlation analysis between classroomanxiety level and the students’ English proficiency shows that the two are in close relationship. So the empirical research shows that the students’ English classroom anxiety and their Englishproficiency are in significant negative correlation. The application of multimedia-assistedsituational teaching can ease English classroom anxiety of the higher vocational college studentsand thus improve their English proficiency.This study is feasible as far as the research methods as well as the research process andresults are concerned. What this study has told us is that teachers should realize Englishclassroom anxiety can affect students’ English learning and should take some measures to lowerstudents’ foreign language learning anxiety, thus improving their English performance. Based onthe results of this research, the author also puts forward some specific suggestions on how toease students’ English classroom anxiety, with the expectation that it would provide somereference and inspiration for English teaching in higher vocational colleges.