A Study On English Speaking Anxiety And Regulation Strategies Of Students In Senior Art School

Anxiety is one of the most influential emotional factors in language learning,especially the output of foreign language speaking.In foreign language learning,speaking anxiety is common.How to reduce the anxiety in the students' oral output to improve the efficiency of classroom teaching and the level of students' oral English? It is a big problem that teachers need to solve urgently.However,in our country,most of the research on English speaking anxiety mainly focuses on ordinary college students and middle school students.While there are few related research on this group of art students,moreover,research on teachers' regulation strategies to reduce students' anxiety level is also lacking.In view of this,the research investigates the state of English speaking anxiety of senior art school students,and tries to explore an effective method to reduce English speaking anxiety.This research aims at 81 students and 1 English teacher in two parallel classes at the first grade of a senior art school in Xinle,Shijiazhuang.During the experiment,the English teacher used specific regulation strategies to help students reduce anxiety in the experimental class,and did not perform anxiety regulation interventions for students in the control class.This study used the “Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale”(FLCAS),oral test and interview as research tools to explore the following three questions:(1)In the spoken English class,what anxiety does the students have?(2)What are the main sources of anxiety in foreign language classes?(3)What strategies can teachers use to help students adjust anxiety to improve students' performance in the classroom? Finally,the researcher used SPSS13.0,analyzed the collected data and studied the relationship between them.The research results showed that the level of English language anxiety in senior art school students is quite obvious,and there is a significant negative correlation between students' English level and anxiety level.In other words,the more anxious students feel,the lower the fluency of oral expression.There are three main sources of anxiety for senior art school students: low proficiency;fear of negative evaluation;overemphasis on written English.The teacher taught students many regulation strategies,such as: relaxing,taking a deep breath,encouraging themselves,making positive evaluations and rewarding themselves,etc.After applying the regulation strategies to oral English teaching,students in experimental class have significantly improved their spoken English performance compared with students in the control class.Based on the experimental procedure and experimental results,the author suggested that teachers can apply appropriate anxiety regulation strategies in oral English teaching to improve students' oral performance and improve teaching effectiveness.Finally,the author analyzed the limitations of this study and looks forward to the future research.