A Study On Reducing The Learners English Language Anxiety Through Cooperative Learning In High School

With the development of the society, more and more researchers put forward the idea that the emphasis of the effective learning should be transformed from how to teach to how to learn, and from the teacher-centeredness to students-centeredness. The researchers pay more and more attention to the affective factors of the learners, which play a very vital role in the process of learning. The affective factors include motivation, self-confidence, self-esteem, attitude, anxiety and so on. Among these affective factors, the anxiety seems to be the biggest obstacle in the process of learning. Language anxiety is a distinct complexity of feelings, beliefs especially the feeling of tension and apprehension occurring when the learners are expected to learn and employ the foreign language in the foreign language classroom. FL anxiety has a great effect on the three processes of language acquisition:the input stage, the processing stage, and the output stage. In China, the students in high school suffer from the great pressure of the College Entrance Examination, and the English is so important subject, thus they bear different levels of FL anxiety.In recent years, Cooperative Learning has been a very popular learning model. Cooperative Learning is a learning model in which students are organized to complete a activity or a task, produce a project together in the heterogeneously mixed small groups. The Cooperative Learning has a great effect on the process of language learning: promote the learners’ self-esteem and self-confidence; stimulate the learners’ motivation; provide more chances to the learners to use the target language to communicate with others; reduce the learners’ language anxiety.What’s the different English language anxiety levels of the students in high school? Can the CL model reduce the English language anxiety and improve the English achievement? To answer these questions, the author conducted this study. This study chose98students from the Guangming New District High School in Shenzhen as the subjects. The author divided the subjects into two groups, one is control group, the other is experimental group. Meanwhile, the author conducted the CL experiments in the experimental group. Before and after the CL experiments, the author carried out the FLCAS questionnaire among all the subjects. After the CL experiments, the author conducted an interview and use a final English examination paper.After analysis of the data from the study, the results prove that:the FL anxiety is common among the students in high school; cooperative learning has a positive effect on reducing the FL anxiety and improve the English achievements of learners.