A Correlative Study Of Language Anxiety And Class Participation

Anxiety is an important affective factor which has a significant position in the studies of second language acquisition. Language anxiety refers to a kind of complicated psychological state with fear and apprehension in the process of foreign language learning. Class activity is a crucial part of language teaching. The communication and interaction between teachers and students is an important way of improving learning efficiency. Only when the students take an active part in class activities and think intelligently can they internalize what they have been taught in the class and make a progress in English learning. Based on the literature review,many researches have been done on language anxiety and class participation,however, the research explored correlation between them are few, therefore, the author did a research to investigate the relationship between language anxiety and class participation in senior high school English class.The study adopts both quantitative and qualitative surveys by using the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale, Questionnaire of Class Participation, interview and classroom observation. 140 students are selected for the study. The collected data are analyzed by SPSS 16.0. The main findings are:(1) Almost every student feels anxious in the English class, and their language anxiety level is high. There is no significant difference between boys and girls in language anxiety. The main causes of students’ language anxiety are communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety.(2) The students’ class participation frequency varies greatly. Generally speaking, the females’ class participation frequency is a little higher than that of the males’.(3) Language anxiety is negatively related to class participation. That is to say, the higher the language anxiety level is, the lower the class participation frequency is, and vice versa.The thesis explores the relationship between foreign language anxiety and class participation and makes some suggestions to lower language anxiety level and improve class participation and hopes it can be helpful to the senior English teaching.