More handpicked essays just for you.
The importance of learning strategies in the classroom
Review of related literature about academic pressure
The importance of learning strategies in the classroom
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Introduction
Anxiety plays an important affective role in second or foreign language acquisition. Even though everybody has experienced feelings of anxiousness, anxiety cannot be defined easily in a simple sentence.
The research on anxiety puts forward the idea that anxiety can be experienced at different levels (Horwitz, 2001; Oxford, 1999). Horwitz and Cope (1986) described foreign language anxiety as a distinct complex phenomenon of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning mainly resulting from the uniqueness of the language learning process. In addition, Macintyre (1995) noted that anxiety plays different roles in the learning process. It may facilitate or debilitate performance of the learners.Facilitating anxiety motivates the learners to confront the new learning task without reluctance. Debilitating anxiety motivates learners to select an avoidance attitude and therefore tends to escape from the learning task.Oxford (1999) uses the terms “harmful” and “helpful”(as cited in Brown, 2007) anxiety for debilitative and facilitative anxiety, respectively. Both facilitative anxiety and debilitative anxiety are connected to one's academic performance. Sometimes anxiety helps students to increase their motivation for harder studying. Therefore, a little anxiety can have positive effects on students’ performance. But, according to Brown (2007, p. 163) “too much and too little anxiety may hinder the process of successful second learning”.
Many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students who seek admittance to a university where the foreign language, here English, is the medium of instruction do not have sufficient language skills to understand lectures, comprehend textbooks, particip...
... middle of paper ...
...e anxiety: Institutional responses. In E.K. Horwitz&D. J. Young (Eds.).Language anxiety: From theory and research tclassroom implications (pp. 169-176). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Samimy, K. K. (1989). A Comparative study of teaching Japanese in the audio-lingual method and the counseling-learning approach. The Modern Language Journal,
73 (2), 169-177.
Spielmann, G., &Radnofsky, M. L. (2001).Learning language under tension: Newdirectionsfrom a qualitative study.The Modern Language Journal, 85 (2), 259-278.
Schwarzer, R. (1986). Self-related cognition in anxiety and motivation: An introduction. R. Schwarzer (Ed.), Self-related cognition in anxiety and motivation (pp. 1-17). Hillsdale, NJErlbaum.
Young, D. J. (1991). Creating a low-anxiety classroom environment: What does language anxiety research suggest? The Modern Language Journal, 75 (4), 426-439