College English Teachers' Foreign Language Anxiety And The Amounts Of Their English Use In Classroom

For recent years, foreign language (FL) anxiety has been abundantly studied. But most of these studies centered on FL students, and few of them ever took FL teachers under consideration. Horwitz (1996) argued that many foreign language teachers still experienced foreign language anxiety and that this anxiety could have negative consequences for language teaching. At the same time, an examination of the amounts target language (TL) use aroused more and more attention recently. But there are only a few researches centered on their correlation, even fewer in China. The current study addressed the issues of college English teachers'FL anxiety, their amounts of English use in class, and the correlation between these two constructs.This thesis is composed of 6 parts. Part 1 is introduction which illustrates the research background, significance, and purpose. Part 2 focuses on reviewing the above issues related to the research questions. This includes the review concerning the studies of FL anxiety as well as the amounts of TL use by teachers in classroom. Part 3 includes the relative researches which focused on the effect of teachers'FL anxiety, the importance of the TL use in FL classroom, and the relation between these two constructs. Part 4 is research design. This study includes Teachers'Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (TFLAS), self-report measure of English use and classroom observation. 45 college English teachers from Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Northwest University for Nationalities, and Lanzhou University of Technology, participated in the study. A correlational study, simple regression analysis and multiple regression analysis were computed. Part 5 is the results and discussion of the study.Part 6 is the conclusion of the study. And we got the following conclusions: (1) Of all the 45 participants, no one experienced high level's anxiety, 31.11% reported moderate anxiety, and 68.89% of them experienced little or no anxiety, with the mean of TFLAS is 49.71 which is lower than 54, suggesting that college English teachers experience little or no FL anxiety, but part of them reported moderate anxiety. These results may due to the teaching age of the participants. Correlation coefficient between TFLAS and teaching age was -.368. Sig. (2-tailed) was .013. p<.05. Of all the 45 participants, only 12 are teaching assistants. It is no wonder that only 31.11% reported moderate anxiety. (2) The participants reported 54.53% of classroom discourse occurred in English with the actual range from 20% to 100%, which is lower than the request that classroom should provide an environment in which both teachers and students use TL much of the time. The result also showed that English was used more for explaining text, less overall for teaching new words, and less still for instructing exercises. The possible reasons to these results may be the teachers'concern over the students in classroom and their own foreign language proficiency. (3) TFLAS and the amounts of English use were significantly negative correlated. And simple regression analysis showed that TFLAS was a powerful negative predictor of the amounts of English use withβ=-1.2 and p<.05, which proved Horwitz's (1992) expectation that some language teachers may actually avoid either consciously or unconsciously using the target language due to their feelings of anxiety. But the multiple regression analysis showed that the influence of the participants'personal variables, teaching age, teaching status and educational background to the amounts of English was not significant.The study is of pedagogical significance in that it helps to understand Chinese college English teachers'FL anxiety and their amounts of English use in classroom. It has offered some suggestions for English teachers to decrease teachers'FL anxiety, and increase the amounts of English use.