Journal Article: Creating a Low-anxiety classroom environment

After being a foreign language learner and now a teacher assistant in a Spanish classroom, I have experienced and observed certain levels of anxiety when asked to speak in the target language. For me, my anxiety came when I would speak Spanish with other native English speakers because I knew that we were speaking for correctness and proficiency and not for survival. My preference is to speak with native Spanish speaker who knows no English at all, thus allowing me to make errors with no shame or hesitation so that I can try my best to get my point across. This anxiety is different for every student. The anxiety for some might come from confidence issues with social conversations in general, they are not given back encouragement for their efforts after spoken, or the environment of the classroom is a a high anxiety classroom where errors are publicized and effort are not recognized.
Research on foreign and second language anxiety is hard to address because the relationship between anxiety and language learning/performance could not be viewed without taking into account an assortment of variables, such as language setting, anxiety definitions, anxiety measures, age of subject, etc. Dolly Young suggests in her journal Creating a low-Anxiety Classroom Environment: What does language anxiety research suggest?, that language anxiety arises from: 1) personal and interpersonal anxieties; 2)learner beliefs about language learning; 3) instructor beliefs about language learning; 4) Instructor-leaner interactions; 5) classroom procedures; and 6) language testing.So from these six probable causes of language anxiety, how do we as teachers create a low-anxiety classroom to have an effective learning environment?
Well Young suggests that the modeling approach to error correction, students are not spotlighted in front of their peers and corrected, but correct feedback is given to those language learners who need it (Young, 8). This relates to our classroom discourse article as it talks about modeling feedback. Lyster and Ranta (1997) found the following types of corrective feedback were used by teachers in their interactions with the students: recasts, explicit correction, repetition, metalinguistic feedback,  and clarification requests. By providing corrective feedback in your classroom, you can help the student's language anxiety of Instructor-learner interactions which is one of the listed causes of anxiety in the classroom.
Another aspect of language anxiety are personal and interpersonal anxieties. Research was done in a classroom in Turkey to seek an answer to the question as to whether Computer-Mediated Communication Technologies be a solution for overcoming problems of sufficient time for practice to enable students to achieve fluency in speaking though internalizing the structures, and establishing a balance between fluency and accuracy. Research found that computer-mediated communication (CMC) emerges as a feasible solution particularly for improvement of speaking skills and decreasing the level of foreign language anxiety by raising self-confidence of the students within the scope of both formal and distance education (TOJDE,2). For example, these numbers were obtained by an analysis of the data from the text chat logs automatically kept via flash player, the findings show that with the task based information gap activity via chat room, where 96.7% of the words used by the students during activity were in the target language. Their comments as to why they enjoyed these activities the most important reason was because they were related to their own lives ans that they used them frequently. One student says, " it was enjoyable to explain something that belongs to me." We see, that integrating technology and really trying to create a low-anxiety classroom is really important. The modeling approach and CMC can be used to differentiate your instruction to allow students to achieve fluency in the target language. My response to my research about classroom anxiety is that as teachers, we need to be attentive to the needs of our students, how we interact with them and how we create procedures to combat language anxieties. If you want to read more, the two articles are attached below.

Computer-Mediated Communication in Foreign Language Education: Use of Target Language and Learner Perceptions

by Ozdener, Nesrin and Satar, H. Muge 04/2008, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 16

Creating a Low-Anxiety Classroom Environment: What Does Language Anxiety Research Suggest?

Dolly Jesusita Young

The Modern Language Journal
Vol. 75, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 426-439

Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/329492