An Empirical Study Of The Impact On Students' Foreign Language Learning Motivation And Anxiety By Using Cooperative Learning Strategy

Foreign language learners' affective factors attract much more attention than before for researchers all over the world.These affective factors which play key roles during the students' learning process include motivation,anxiety,attitude,belief and so on.Among these factors,motivation and anxiety are the most vital elements for foreign language learners' success.Many studies have shown that motivation can influence learners' personal independence,attention to the study and the application of some studying skills,finally the academic achievement of language learning.Language anxiety is a kind of complicated feeling of tension which will occur when the language learners want to communicate with their peers.Anxiety has a great impact on three processes of language acquisition: language input,language processing,and the language output.Anxiety has a close relationship with the learners' motivation,attitude,and self-evaluation and language proficiency.Cooperative Learning is a new teaching approach which becomes more and more popular.In CL classroom,students in heterogeneously mixed groups are involved to complete a task together.CL has a great impact on foreign language learning:(1)promote foreign language learners' self-esteem and their self-confidence;(2)stimulate learners' learning motivation;(3)provide more opportunities for learners to make use of the target language to communicate with peers;(4)reduce language learners' anxiety.This study will make an experimental investigation into the effectiveness of CL in promoting language learning motivation and reducing foreign language learning anxiety.The research questions of the current study are:1.What is the actual situation of the college students' foreign language learning motivation and anxiety?2.How does CL influence students' foreign language learning motivation and anxiety?3.What are students' attitudes toward CL?To answer the above three questions,the present study conducted an experiment which lasted for one semester.Participants were 55 second-year college non-English majors who were from a university in the north of China.Two classes were selected.Then one class was randomly assigned as the intervention group(N= 29)which adopted CL and the other as the comparison group(N= 26)which adopted traditionalteaching.The author employed both quantitative and qualitative methods in the experiment,including an English proficiency test,three times of English Learning Motivation Scale,three times of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale,a Needs Analysis questionnaire and an interview.All the quantitative data were analyzed by SPSS20.0.Combined with the qualitative data,the results indicated that:(1)there exist low learning motivation and high anxiety among college students;(2)CL teaching method can reduce students' English learning anxiety but cannot promote motivation while comparing with the traditional teaching method;(3)college students accept CL as an effective way to learn English.So according to the findings of this study,the author advises that CL could be employed in the English classroom.