An Empirical Study On Anxiety-relieving Questioning Strategies In Senior High English Classroom

English is employed as a foreign language within China.In English classroom,teachers start a conversation by giving questions.An important way of communication between teachers and students is questions and answers.Questions,as a major means of communication,the process of interaction,as well as the medium of teaching,occupy a considerable amount of time of classroom teaching.Throughout China's English teaching classroom,if teachers are not capable to employ this questioning strategies flexibly and appropriately,students will get anxious more easily.Many studies show that moderate anxiety can be helpful to improve students' internal drive,promote their interests and stimulate learning motivation.But excessive anxiety will bring more negative effects,dampen the enthusiasm for learning,and discourage students in the classroom,so that students have psychological weariness,even play truant.Anxiety is a big obstacle for learning,affecting learning efficiency.High anxiety learners will have other aspects of problems apart from learning,such as problems with psychology and disposition.In this paper,the author took five English teachers and 71 students in two classes of Chengdu No.12 Middle School as an example to explore the relationship between anxiety and questioning strategies.The author investigated four aspects of questioning strategies,forms of questions,distribution,wait time and feedback through classroom observation,questionnaires and interviews.All the data collected were processed by SPSS20.0.The results show that most of students suffer from anxiety and even some of them belong to high anxiety learners.Top students are less anxious than those who are less capable.At the same time,asking open questions,which can be helpful in their thinking ability and keeping the difficulty of questions can relieve students' anxiety to some extent;increasing wait time and especially adopting positive feedback are effective in relieving students' foreign language anxiety.This study also shows that most of teachers seldom use negative evaluation in class,and all of them use positive evaluation.This study can be helpful in optimizing teachers' questioning strategies,relieving students' foreign language anxiety and improving students' learning efficiency both theoretically and practically.