4。1。2。2 Fear of negative evaluation 12

4。1。2。3 Inadequate preparation-time 13

4。1。2。4 Other causes of speak-in-class anxiety 14

4。2 Suggestion on teaching strategies 14

4。2。1 Developing students’ speaking confidence 15

4。2。2 Giving students’ positive evaluations 15

4。2。3 Some other teaching strategies 16

5 Conclusion 18

5。1 Major findings 18

5。2 Limitations and suggestions for future research 18

6 References 20

1 Introduction

1。1 Background 

Speak-in-class anxiety is a widespread problem in foreign language learning, which has troubled both students and teachers a lot。 According to my experience, I was afraid or anxious to be asked to answer the questions in English class, particularly under the situation that there is no time for me to get well prepared。 Generally speaking, there are two types of teachers’ questioning, randomly and regularly。 Anxiety occurs to students more frequently if the teacher prefer to question randomly in class, and there is also a common phenomenon that students will prepare their answers quite beforehand if the teacher follows some regular rulers, such as student ID。 Curiosity pushes me to figure out whether there is anxiety in English class, and if yes, what are causes of this existence。 What’s more, exercitation in Linhai foreign language middle school provides me a chance to make related observation, investigation and research。 

The English Curriculum Standards (2003)’s goal for junior middle school students is to achieve comprehensive language proficiency, which includes knowledge, language skills, affect and attitude, learning strategies and cultural consciousness。 Students are required to master the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills。 However, speak-in-class anxiety is a quite great block for students to achieve comprehensive language proficiency, particularly the speaking skill。 The speaking skill is of great importance to foreign language learning, while the weakness of the majority of Chinese students in English learning lies in speaking skill, and to some extent, for some English teachers in the junior middle school, speaking skill teaching is considered to be tough and largely overlooked。 Thus, a great part of Chinese learners who have a very excellent master of grammars and vocabularies, fail to express themselves in fluent and decent English。 In other words, some English learners have “dumb English” or “silent English”。 There is no doubt that the examination-oriented education system should be responsible for this awkward phenomenon。 To be more exact, speak-in-class anxiety also account for the learning contradiction。

Besides, the recent teaching methods also think high of speaking skill or the communication skill。 In the past, the focus in English as a foreign language contexts used to be on methods such as grammar translation，audio-lingual and more of the same。 However, when we consider recent techniques, it could easily be seen that the focus has shifted from these methods to communicative methods。 The key factor of learning second language is being able to use it and to communicate through it。 Moreover, students should play a major role in class, while because of the speak-in-class anxiety, they talk little in class, which is against the value and idea of the recent teaching methods。

1。2 Purpose/Significance

With the development of the humanism education and the student-oriented education, the affect problem in language acquisition has drawn more and more attention。 Anxiety, as one factor of affect, has gained a lot of popularity in the foreign language teaching research。 However, there is nearly a gap in Chinese researches about the speak-in-class anxiety。