Research On Teaching Anxiety Of EFL Pre-service Teachers In Senior High Schools

It is well accepted that teaching is a stressful career for its great responsibilities and challenges.Teaching profession is placed among professions that caused much more anxieties(Putter,2003;Kyriacous,2000;Morteza and Morteza,2014;Mahmoudia and Ozkanb,2016).However,researches on anxiety concerning teaching have remained rather limited,especially there is a serious lack of studies on pre-service teachers'teaching anxiety in China.This study aims to investigate teaching anxiety of English pre-service teachers based on three research questions:What's the impact of pre-service teachers' teaching anxiety on their teaching?What's the factor contributing to pre-service teachers' teaching anxiety?How to reduce pre-service teachers' teaching anxiety?In order to investigate causes of teaching anxiety of pre-service English teachers,both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in current study.Firstly,a modified questionnaire according to Zhang Wei' Chinese as Foreign Language Novice Teacher Teaching Anxiety Questionnaire and Wu Qiong's the Teaching Anxiety Scale was administered to all 32 participants who took practicum task in four different senior high schools in Wuhan city and 31 valid questionnaires were gathered.Then twelve of them were invited to do an interview with an aim to examine the impacts of teaching anxiety on teaching performance and the coping strategies that they used to reduce their teaching anxiety successfully in their teaching practice.The data showed that sources of teaching anxiety can be categorized as external factors and internal factors.External factors were mainly student-related.Students'questions,students' evaluation,student' learning interests and motivation and student-teacher relationship were all generalized into external factors.Internal factors include teachers' teaching skills,language proficiency and teachers' personality.There is another important finding that almost all participants considered that teaching anxiety had negative impacts on teaching performance.The third finding is that there were techniques that can be used to cope with teaching anxiety successfully.Preparing a detailed lesson plan,improving teaching skills and language proficiency,being more confident and keeping a positive attitude are all good measures to manage teaching anxiety.The current study helps pre-service teachers to understand teaching anxiety and it has provided them with some suggestions to reduce teaching anxiety and enjoy teaching.