Investigating Senior High School Students’ Reticence And Foreign Language Anxiety In English Classes

Although the New Curriculum Standards advocates “student-centered” mode oflanguage teaching, traditional teacher-centered style is still popular in most Englishclasses. Research (Cheng,2000; Liu＆Jackson,2008; Littlewood,2010) indicatedthat although most students expressed the willingness to communicate and participatein classroom activities in the target language, they still kept reticent and passive inclass. Classroom reticence makes the classroom atmosphere boring, degrade students’learning efficiency, make teachers embarrassed, and therefore influence a languageclass in a very negative way. Researchers have paid much attention to thephenomenon of students’ classroom reticence. How to reduce students’ classroomreticence now becomes one of the topics worth being studied.Most research on reticence is mainly based on the multi-culture classroomsettings, while domestic research is mainly on university students’ reticence, with lessattention paid to senior high middle school students’ reticence and their languageanxiety. According to the current situation of reticence in senior high schoolclassroom, this thesis sets out to focus on the degree both of students’ reticence andlanguage anxiety in English classroom in a senior high middle school, and furtherinvestigates the relationship between the students’ reticence and language anxiety, andwhat is the role of “anxiety” among all of factors leading to classroom reticence.In order to reach these research objectives, the scales, the questionnaire andinterview were conducted in this study.349students from No.1Middle school ofFeng Qing County participated in the study.“The Unwillingness to CommunicateScale” and “the Foreign Language Anxiety Classroom Scale” were used torespectively measure the degree of the students’ reticence and foreign languageanxiety in English classroom. Then their relationship was analyzed throughCorrelations Analysis. The questionnaire was used to find out the factors influencingstudents’ reticence in English classes and explore how powerful or influential“anxiety” is among all the reticence-forming factors. The interview was a supplement for questionnaire investigation, and some suggestions about reducing students’reticence and their language anxiety were collected from the interview.Results of this study reveal that a lot of students have a positive attitude towardsclassroom discussion and communication. They are willing to interact with otherstudents, with few unwilling to communicate. Many students experience a moderateanxiety, communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and anxiety test.There is a significant positive correlation between students’ reticence and their foreignlanguage anxiety. Namely, the more anxious students are, the more often they keepreticent. Anxiety overall plays a very important role in influencing the students’reticence based on analyzing questionnaire and interview. However, anxiety does notrank first among all the reticence-forming factors.Based on the results of the scales and the questionnaire, interview, somesuggestions provided by students, this thesis propose several suggestions from theperspective of instructors to reduce the students’ reticence and their foreign languageanxiety, which may help teachers create a relaxed and interesting class and helpstudents improve their ability of language use.