Special Feature

The Teacher as Facilitator: Reducing anxiety in the EFL university classroom

Peter Burden, Okayama Shoka University
February 2005
(This article was originally published in JALT Hokkaido Journal, 2004, Vol.8 pp. 3-18. JALT Hokkaido Web Site)

For references and tables, please download the full PDF file.

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Introduction

Anxious students are often concerned about the impressions that others form of them. When such students are confronted in a classroom with a learning situation that makes them uncomfortable, they may choose to withdraw from the activity. Some learners believe they cannot perform in English and consequently form negative expectations, which in turn lead to decreased effort and the avoidance of opportunities to enhance their communication skills. This study replicates Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope's (1991) Foreign language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and results show that around half of the students in conversation classes at the focus university suffer from some level of language anxiety. This paper suggests that learners' level of motivation and effort can be raised when teachers use communicative strategies and adopt a language facilitating role by encouraging students to assess their performance in a positive light.

“Around half of the students in conversation classes at the focus university suffer from some level of language anxiety."”

Many of us have been in situations as language learners when we are asked a question and our minds mysteriously go blank. Or perhaps our heads follow a teacher around the class as we nervously await our turn to speak, barely listening to other students' output, our eyes trained on the teacher to see which "unfortunate victim" will be chosen to speak next. At other times we shun communicative opportunities altogether. While some students avoid talking because they are unprepared, uninterested, or unwilling to express themselves, most anxiety stems from feelings of alienation in class, from a lack of confidence, or because the students fear communication itself (Daly, 1991). Reflecting on my own, anxiety-ridden experiences of learning Japanese, I pondered that if my English conversation classes somehow induce anxiety and lead to a miserable experience, then I need to consider how to encourage my own students in their English study.

Task-based language teaching often utilizes incongruity and unpredictable learning activities to encourage communication (Ellis, 2003). Arguably, tasks that are not focused in a sequence of activities that ends with controlled practice may unwittingly encourage anxiety. As Aida (1994) notes, many language teachers are concerned about the possibility that anxiety may function as an affective filter preventing learners from achieving a high level of proficiency in the language. Learners need to have attitudes and use strategies that encourage lowered anxiety, higher motivation, and confidence in their ability to convey what they want to say. One of the challenges for teachers is to provide the kind of classroom atmosphere that promotes low-anxiety.

Classroom Anxiety

Nespor (1987) writes that beliefs are "composed of episodically stored material derived from personal experience" (p. 320) which derive legitimacy from past episodes. These critical episodes then "color or frame the comprehension of events later in time" (ibid.). Thus, learners' experiences determine the value of similar, but new, tasks. In the classroom, students perform a "cognitive appraisal" (Dayhoff, 2000, p.15) which helps affect judgments. Students who experience anxiety in the classroom often base their fear on an inaccurate assessment of its causes. They imagine danger where it does not necessarily exist and do not have an effective plan of action to cope with their anxiety. Over time and in different learning situations people develop expectations concerning the likely outcomes of various behaviors within and across situations, but when they engage in communicative behaviors that seem to work, they develop positive expectations for those behaviors, and these can become a regular part of learners' communicative repertoire.

However, if experiences are negative, language anxiety begins to develop and if these negatively perceived experiences continue, foreign language anxiety may become a regular occurrence and the learner begins to routinely expect to be nervous and perform poorly. Anxiety can be associated with a variety of physiological and emotional states, embodied in feelings of tension even in situations where the immediate cause of such tension is not readily apparent. MacIntyre (1995) concludes that:

Language learning is a cognitive activity that relies on encoding, storage, and retrieval processes, and anxiety can interfere with each of these by creating a divided attention scenario for anxious students. Anxious students are focused on both the task and their reactions to it (p. 96).

Anxiety is related to self-focused, negative and anxious cognition during interaction. Highly anxious students often have relatively negative self-concepts, underestimating the quality of their speaking ability when compared with others.

Anxiety and the Threat to Self-esteem

While some may argue that a dose of anxiety is necessary to create a language learning "charge", for many students nervousness distracts from attending to and remembering new language, and will thus affect the practice required for language to be assimilated. In describing language anxiety, MacIntyre and Gardner (1991) write:

"The anxious student may be characterized as an individual who perceives the L2 as an uncomfortable experience, who withdraws from voluntary participation, who feels social pressures not to make mistakes and who is less willing to try uncertain or novel linguistic forms" (p. 112)

An unwillingness to make an effort can be seen as debilitating in communicative language classrooms, where making an attempt to use new language forms is a central tenet of second language acquisition. This unwillingness may spark what Dayhof (2000) calls the "anxiety feedback loop" (p.27), in which anxiety is triggered by concern over being scrutinized and evaluated by others in a performance situation. This can lead to an excessive fear of being humiliated or judged negatively in learning situations. Yet, I contend that students can make their learning more profitable and less painful by reflecting on their learning experiences and receiving necessary guidance.

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For references and tables, please download the full PDF file.

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