| As one of the most important affective factors, anxiety has attracted manyacademic concerns in the research of foreign language learning. A large number ofprevious studies show that both too high and too low anxieties have a bad effect onlanguage learning; only appropriate levels of anxiety can be facilitating. Most studentsin China are learning English as a foreign language in their classrooms. And theteacher’s questioning takes up much of the time in class. English teacher’s questioningwould definitely influence learners’ anxiety and have serious impact on learners’language learning.This study makes use ofquestionnaires, semi-structured interview and classroomobservation to investigate44junior one students and their English teacher in onemiddle schoolin Chengdu. It aims to probe the relationship between teachers’questioning and students’ FLA in the foreign language classroom, and tries to offersome advice on keeping a reasonable control of FLA.The major results of this study can be concluded as follows: firstly, fromquestionnaires and interviews, it can be easily perceived that studentsexperience lowlevel of anxiety after teacher raising questions; secondly, most of the questions aredisplay closed ones; thirdly, most questions are answered in chorus or by the teacherherself; fourthly, the average wait time is as low as1.06seconds; last, the teacher’s way of giving feedback is quite monotonous, most often being repetition or teachercorrection. All in all, the teacher’s questioning tends to be rigid and monotonous,which seldom causes students’ anxiety. In this case study, the teacher’s questioninghasn’t given students adequate anxiety. It lowers students’ anxiety in the questioningprocess, so as to reduce the effectiveness of both teaching and learning to a certainextent.In light of these results, some suggestions are provided. Teachers are advised toenhance their understanding of the importance of questioningand improvetheirquestioning such as increasing the amount of referential questions according tostudents’ anxiety condition, distributing more questions randomly,extending the waittime, and diversifying their feedbacks. |
