A Case Study Of Non-English Majors’ Classroom Anxiety From The Perspective Of Dynamic Systems Theory

Since1970s,English teaching and learning has shifted from teacher-centered to student-centered. Anxiety, as one of the affective factors, has become the hot issue in SLA research. Since Horwitz and other scholars put forward the concept "foreign language anxiety" in1986, tremendous studies have been undertaken both at home and abroad. These studies focused on the general situation, sources, coping strategies, the relationships between the foreign language classroom anxiety and English learning achievement and skill anxiety such as listening anxiety, speaking anxiety, reading anxiety and writing anxiety. However, most of the studies are undertaken from the traditional reductionist perspective and the research from the perspective of the dynamic systems theory is relatively scant. In terms of the research methods, previous research nearly employed the traditional reductionist approach, such as questionnaire and interview etc. However, the research on the foreign language classroom anxiety using the idiodynamic method has not been found so far.Therefore, based on the dynamic systems theory and the idiodvnamic method, the author employed questionnaires, classroom observation, video, the Anion Variable Tester software and the stimulated recall to investigate the dynamic changes in the foreign language classroom anxiety of four non-English majors. Specifically speaking, the research questions are designed as follows:(1) To what extents does classroom anxiety change when non-English majors tackling tasks with varying degrees of difficulty?(2) What are the reported causes of students’ dynamic change in classroom anxiety?Results indicated that the classroom anxiety of non-English majors show the evidence for the four key properties of dynamic systems:(1) there are changes over time wherein each state is transformed from the previous state;(2) it is shown the interconnectedness between the classroom anxiety and the tasks with varying degrees of difficulty;(3) the anxieties are in the repeller state when tasks begin and in the attractor state when tasks end;(4) the new words and the difficult words have an effect on the easy task, leading the anxiety level high, which is the so-called threshold effect. At the same time, the increases in FLCA are due to the following:(1) the participants don’t know the answer;(2) the participants don’t understand the teachers’requirements or they don’t understand what their teacher has said;(3) the interferences of the new words and the difficult words;(4) their English proficiency decreases due to the fact that the time spent on English learning decreases in university compared with that of senior high school;(5) the participants think their answer is wrong when interrupted by the teacher. Whereas the following three reasons lead to the decrease in FLCA:(1) the classroom task is so easy that the participants can offer the correct answer;(2) the participants have confidence in their performance;(3) the kind prompt and the friendly attitude of the teacher relieve the participants.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter one describes the research background, introduces the research purpose and significance, and lays out the overall structure of this thesis.Chapter two is the literature review. The paradigm shift from the reductionist approach to the Dynamic Systems approach to SLA is overviewed in the first place. Then previous studies on FLCA at home and abroad are summarized. At last, limitations of the research are presented.Chapter three describes the research design in detail, including the research questions, the participants, the research instruments and the research procedures.Chapter four presents and discusses the results of the research. After respectively describing the four participants changes in FLCA on the six foreign language classroom tasks and their attributions, the results of the four participants will be summarized. At last. discussions based on the results are presented.Chapter five is the concluding part. Based on the major findings of the study, the implications for college English teaching and learning are discussed. And the limitations of the study and related suggestions for further research are presented in the end.