Effects Of Implementing Scaffolding Instruction To Alleviate College English Learners' Speaking Anxiety:An Empirical Study

For the four language skills,listening,speaking,reading and writing,speaking proves to be the most anxiety-provoking skill challenging many foreign language learners.As a result of the long period of examination-oriented education system in China,speaking has been neglected for a long time,which leads to "mute English".It is a phenomenon where language learners can understand English,but they cannot communicate well in English.Many college students report that they are suffering from nervous emotions while they are speaking English in public.Foreign language anxiety(FLA),as a significant emotional factor,has caught extensive attention of educators and researchers in recent years.FLA is a complicated emotional reaction,it can cause worrying,fear,nervousness,and apprehension.Researches prove that FLA has negative effects on second language acquisition.In order to find a way to alleviate college students' speaking anxiety,the author carried out an empirical research,attempting to testify the effects of scaffolding instruction on college learners' oral English anxiety.The paper has adopted the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale(FLCAS)designed by Horwitz et al.in 1986 to measure college students' oral English anxiety.The FLCAS are extensively used by massive researchers,and its reliability and validity were widely testified.Based on FLCAS,the following three questions are proposed in order to be served as the guidance of the whole research process:·Can scaffolding instruction alleviate college English learners' speaking anxiety caused by communication apprehension?·Can scaffolding instruction alleviate college English learners'speaking anxiety caused by test anxiety?·Can scaffolding instruction alleviate college English learners' speaking anxiety caused by the fear of negative evaluation?This empirical study was carried out from February 2017 to the end of June 2017.The participants of this study are 71 first-year non-English majors from North Minzu University,in which 36 in experiment class(EC)and 35 in control class(CC).Scaffolding instruction was implemented in EC while traditional oral English teaching method was adopted in CC.The findings of this research show that the scaffolding instruction can alleviate college English learners' speaking anxiety caused by communication apprehension,test anxiety and the fear of negative evaluation.It is hoped that this research could be served as a reference for the further related studies.