The Study Of The Classroom Anxiety And Strategies For Art Majors In Learning English

Since the1970s, the focus of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has shiftedfrom “how to teach” to “how to learn”, which naturally causes the research focus point to shiftfrom teachers to students. One of the important research fields is the individual learners’affective factors. Among all the affective factors, anxiety is one of the most important variables.Anxiety is a subjective feeling towards nerve, anxiety, shyness and worry of the neural system.Caused by the peculiarities of the language learning process, Foreign language classroomlearning anxiety is an affective complex in the language learning process associated withclassroom language learning. It includes test anxiety, communication anxiety, fear of the failingthe class, fear of negative evaluation, negative attitude anxiety and so on.In the English classroom learning, anxiety factors directly affect the performance ofstudents, and then influence the effect of classroom teaching. Throughout several decades ofresearch at home and abroad, some researchers simply investigate the phenomenon of anxietywhich occurs in the students’ process of learning English of the common colleges. Theresearches may also show the college students experience the anxiety when learning differentlanguage skills. In addition, such studies mainly focus on students of elementary education andregular institutions of higher education. And few studies have been done to explore the Englishclassroom anxiety state of art majors who have poor English grades generally.The thesis mainly investigates the following three questions, focusing on135art studentsof one Art University of Jinan as subjects of the study based on Horwitz and his colleagues’Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS):(1) What is the overall situation of the art students’ English classroom anxiety?(2) What are the differences in the English classroom anxiety between males and femalesof art majors?(3) What are the reasons causing the English classroom anxiety and the correspondingstrategies?According to the questionnaire and the semi-structured interview, the overall situation ofart students’ English classroom anxiety is obvious, and the reasons and corresponding strategies have been further investigated. The main findings are:(1) Most art majors experience anxiety in English Class. The students of high level anxietyand free of anxiety occupy only9%of the entire subjects while the students of mid-level andlow-level anxiety in all take up91%of the entire subjects in English classes. As for the anxietylevel for the five dimensions, they are ranked as follows: test anxiety, communication anxiety,negative attitude, fear of failing the class and fear of negative evaluation. The art majors aremore worried about their test performance.(2) According to the independent samples test the difference between the anxiety levels ofmale and female subjects is not significant. Although females have lower levels of anxiety thanmales, they do not have significant differences. According to the present study, most studentsfall into the mid-level anxiety group. And no male belongs to the free anxiety group. The meanscore of males in every group is a bit higher than females, which means males experience moreanxiety than females.(3) The interaction between the teacher and the students would be easy to arouse theanxiety. However, most students would take positive measures to respond to the anxiety. As forthe reasons, being worry about the roll call of the English teacher, doing not reach the learningexpectation, being lack of confidence in the English foundation and being short of the Englishlearning methods are chosen by most students. The measures include looking up the references,communicating with the other students, listening to the teacher carefully in class and so on.The research is important to the art majors, for they can acquire an overall view of theirown anxiety condition and degree. They will come up with proper and positive strategies toovercome anxiety and become more confident in learning English. By transferring debilitatinganxiety into facilitating anxiety, they will be able to improve their English leaning effectiveness.It is of practical significance to study the foreign language leaning anxiety and it will helpEnglish teachers to diagnose the students’ anxiety problems properly and find out theappropriate strategies.In order to create a good learning environment for students, the teachers should create alow level anxiety classroom atmosphere as far as possible. they should also adjust teachingmethods in accordance with the individual differences of students. And moreover they canstrengthen the confidence of students and guide them to find the reasons of the anxiety and use proper learning strategies more efficiently to reduce their anxiety level, converting it to thefacilitating anxiety so as to improve the learning effect.