Anxiety In Second Language Essay

Anxiety is probably a number one problem among learners of L2. It follows that it is “a major obstacle to be overcome in learning to speak another language” (Horwitz et al., 1986: 125). In fact, the problem of how to overcome learners’ anxiety has always been encountered by teachers of English, for whom teaching to speak the target language may be an exceptionally demanding activity. Tsui (1996), for instance, emphasizes that a vast majority of teachers of English admit to face dilemmas of encouraging learners to speak in the classroom. Hopefully, it would not be too far-reaching an assumption that both teaching to speak L2 and learners’ speaking anxiety should be enhanced somehow to encourage learners to speak L2 in the classroom. On the other

When learners are given a speaking task they should know what is the aim of that particular task, is to create either understandable meaning or error-free utterance. Indeed, “[Speaking] activities which focus students on content rather than of form (…) [are] reported as effective” (Tsui, 1996: 163). They are effective perhaps due to their resemblance to situations of real-life communication, where we pay more attention to what has been said rather than how it has been said. Secondly, classroom speaking activities should reflect a real need for communication. That is to say, interactional and transactional nature of communication should be practiced during classroom speaking. The former “includes both establishing and maintaining social relationships”, the latter “involves communicating to get something done” (Bailey, 2003: 56). For example, it seems incredibly valuable that asking learners many follow-up questions has great potential to show learners that someone (in this case - teacher) is interested in them and establishing positive relationships is totally possible. In turn, learners’ ability to achieve transactionality in communication can be increased with the use of