A Case Study On The Effect Of A Junior High School EFL Teacher’s Classroom Behaviors On Students’ Foreign Language Anxiety

In our country, the development in the education domain is not balanced very much. Generally speaking, the educational development in eastern areas is better and faster than the one in western areas; urban education develops much faster and better than rural education. EFL (English as foreign language) teaching and learning is no exception. Therefore, in the western rural middle school with lagging EFL pedagogical development, traditional teacher-centered and grammar-centered English classes are not rare. In the teacher-centered English class, students often feel more anxious than they do in classes with other teaching styles, therefore students’foreign language anxiety (short in "FLA" in the later context) also relatively lies in a higher level.Foreign language anxiety as an affective variable in learning process has been explored within recent40years. Horwitz et al.(1986,128) conceptualized foreign language anxiety as a "distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process". In the past four decades, foreign language anxiety has been examined mainly from the perspectives of the potential sources or causes of anxiety, the effect of foreign language anxiety as well as the relationship between foreign language anxiety and learner variables. However, few researches have touched the relationship between classroom behaviors of EFL teacher (especially teachers in western rural middle school) and students’foreign language anxiety in detail.The present study attempts to probe the relationship between teacher’s both verbal and nonverbal behaviors in class and students’foreign language anxiety. It mainly focuses on three important questions:(1) Do the EFL teacher’s classroom behaviors have influence on students’FLA?(2) What classroom behaviors of the EFL teacher can easily lead to students’FLA?(3)What is the relationship between teacher’s classroom behaviors and students’FLA? In addition, the study hopes to offer some evidence and suggestions for alleviating students’FLA in later EFL teaching and learning from the perspective of teacher’s behaviors.The present research employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. An EFL teacher from a western rural middle school and his48students from one intact conversation class in Junior One were recruited in the research. The whole process was conducted in two parts-pretest and posttest. The research took3months or so. The first month was spent to take naturalistic observation, carry out questionnaire surveys and conduct a group interview in order to investigate students’overall attitudes towards teacher’s classroom behaviors and students’degrees of FLA. After the data were collected and analyzed, the participant teacher tried to modify his classroom behaviors referring to the collected results. After two months, students retook the FLCAS (Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale) for testing their degrees of FLA, which was used in pretest, to finish the posttest. Later the statistical data were used to compare students’ degrees of FLA revealed in the pretest and the posttest.At last, according to the results presented in former naturalistic observations, questionnaires and the group interview, the main findings are summarized as follows. Firstly, the EFL teacher’s classroom behaviors have significant influence on students’ FLA. Secondly, the teacher’s verbal behaviors more easily lead to students’FLA than his nonverbal ones, especially the teacher’s error correction means which most easily leads to students’FLA. Thirdly, students’FLA can be alleviated through the teacher’s improvement on his classroom behaviors to some extent. In addition, based on the major findings of this research, the author puts forward some related suggestions on how to alleviate students’FLA in junior high school.