| The relationship between anxiety and education has been studied throughout the world for years. With the development of humanistic psychology in 1960 s, affective factors in English teaching attracted more and more scholars and researchers’ attention at home and abroad. As one of the major affective factors, anxiety has received increasingly academic concerns, especially English classroom anxiety.Previous studies have focused on the relationship between foreign language learning anxiety and other learning factors, while paid less attention to the relationship between foreign language learning anxiety and teachers. The role of the teacher has a profound impact on the students’ language anxiety. Although previous studies have revealed that English teacher is one of the major reasons that lead to students’ classroom anxiety, the empirical studies specially for the teacher-caused anxiety are rare. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to analyze the general situation of senior high school students’ teacher-caused anxiety in English classroom and explore the causes of teacher-caused anxiety, in order to put forward some strategies to moderate students’ teacher-caused anxiety.This study mainly investigates the overall situation of senior high school students’ teacher-caused anxiety in English classroom through questionnaire and interview. The study involves 195 students and 3 teachers and they are all from Xia Yi senior high school in Henan Province. It is based on both quantitative and qualitative studies. Both the questionnaire and the interview mainly include seven aspects: anxiety caused by teachers’ language, anxiety caused by teachers’ questioning, anxiety caused by teachers’ classroom activities, anxiety caused by teachers’ error correction, anxiety caused by teachers’ classroom evaluation, anxiety caused by teachers’ quality, and anxiety caused by teachers’ bad temper. The present study is designed to find the answers to the three research questions from quantitative and qualitative point of view:Firstly, what is the overall current situation of students’ teacher-caused anxiety in senior high school English classroom?Secondly, what are the differences of the degree of teacher-caused anxiety among different grades?Thirdly, what are the main causes of teacher-caused anxiety in senior high school English classroom?Through the analysis of questionnaires for students and the interview for both teachers and students, the present study indicates: Firstly, there exactly exists slightly higher than medium degree of teacher-caused anxiety in senior high school English classroom. Teachers should focus on this issue and take some proper measures to change the current situation, in order to improve students’ learning interest in English. Secondly, the three grades show significant difference in the degree of teacher-caused anxiety and senior two students have the highest degree of teacher-caused anxiety among three grades. The reason is decided by the psychological and learning characteristics of senior two students. Thirdly, teachers’ questioning, teachers’ classroom activities, and teachers’ language are the major causes of teacher-caused anxiety, which have the great influence on the degree of teacher-caused anxiety of the students. More specifically, in the aspect of questioning, the improper ways of questioning, the time of preparation, the difficulty of the question, and the distribution of the questions will increase the level of students’ teacher-caused anxiety. As for the teachers’ classroom activities, the teachers should pay attention to the validity, reasonableness, and property of the activities and try to know the true feelings of the students when they participate in classroom activities, in order to improve the quality of classroom activities and make students feel more relaxed. In the aspect of teachers’ language, we can conclude that the unclear teachers’ language, speaking too fast, language with many new words, and too harsh words will cause the invisible anxiety of the students.Based on these findings, this paper aims to make English teachers understand the students’ teacher-caused anxiety more clearly, and improve teachers’ behavior and teaching quality to create a classroom environment with low degree of teacher-caused anxiety. |
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