KOTESOL International Conference 2016
(Concurrent Session)
Peter Burden, Okayama Shoka University, Japan
Language Learning Anxiety Among Tertiary Students
Abstract
Anxious students are often concerned about the impressions that others form of them, and when students are confronted in a classroom with a learning situation that they feel will make them uncomfortable, the choice between "fight" or "flight" is often an easy one. This study administered the Foreign language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) survey with 289 university students in a Japanese context and results show that half of the students in communicative classes suffer from potentially debilitating language anxiety. This presentation suggests that through encouraging students to assess their performance in a positive light, and teachers adopting a language facilitating role as well as encourage learning and communicative strategies which can aid language use and acquisition, learner's level of motivation and effort can be raised.
Biographicals
Peter Burden gained his doctorate in TESOL from Exeter University in his native Britain on the theme of student evaluation of teaching in a tertiary context. He has published in many international journals on this subject, and written a number of book chapters. Also, he has presented widely on this theme, recently in Oman, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Australia and Korea as well as many times in Japan where he has taught for over 25 years.
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