Causes of English-Speaking Anxiety among Secondary School Students and Classroom Intervention Strategies from the Perspective of Foreign Language Anxiety Theory

Abstract

With the continuous advancement of compulsory education English curriculum reform in China, oral expression has become a core cultivation objective of middle school English teaching. However, a large number of teaching observations and empirical studies have found that foreign language speaking anxiety widely exists among adolescent EFL learners, which inhibits students ’  willingness   to  communicate,  reduces  their  oral  output  fluency  and  restricts  the improvement  of  comprehensive   English   competence.  Based  on  Horwitz ’s   classic  Foreign Language Anxiety Theory, this study adopts the literature research method to sort out the typical manifestations, internal and  external inducing factors of middle school students’ oral  English anxiety,  and  constructs targeted classroom intervention strategies from the dimensions  of classroom atmosphere, oral task design, error correction mode and diversified evaluation. The research finds that middle  school students ’  oral  anxiety   originates   from  the  interaction of individual psychological  characteristics  and  inappropriate  classroom teaching behaviors.  Low self-efficacy, fear of negative evaluation, single teacher-centered teaching and harsh public error correction are the major incentives for anxiety. To relieve oral anxiety, teachers should build an inclusive low-anxiety classroom environment, design differentiated graded oral tasks, adopt gentle delayed  corrective  feedback  and  implement  process-oriented  positive  evaluation.  This  study enriches localized research on foreign language anxiety among Chinese secondary students and provides operable teaching suggestions for frontline middle school English teachers to reduce learners ’ speaking anxiety.