Reducing Students’Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Through Drama Performance

School of Foreign Studies,Huzhou University,Huzhou,China Email:junyang04@126.com

[Abstract]Language anxiety is one of the most important emotional factors in foreign language learning and is pervasive among the learners.Of the four skills,speaking is more likely to induce anxiety.By doing the experimental research,this article suggests that English drama play can reduce the students’anxiety in speaking English,moreover it is helpful to organize the activities in College English teaching.

[Keywords]drama performance;oral English;anxiety

Introduction

It is clearly stated inCollege Curriculum Requirements(2017)that“the objective of College English is to develop students’ability to use English in a well-rounded way,especially in listening and speaking,….”However,there are some practical factors which have negative influence in College English teaching,such as the shortening credits and the unfavorable learning atmosphere,etc.So there are some difficulties in improving the students’ability in oral English.This is partly due to the fact that some students mainly focus on how to improve their academic scores in the senior schools and they pay little or no attention to the skill of speaking.So they might have trouble in expressing themselves by using English.Meanwhile,some students are reluctant to answer the question in English or communicate with their partners in English just because they are afraid of making mistakes,which will be considered as“losing face”.In other words,they have anxieties if they are asked to speak in English.

anxiety has been considered as one of the major obstacles in foreign language learning.Horwitz(2001)thinks that one-third of all foreign language learners experience some level of language anxiety.And the studies in the field of Foreign Language Anxiety have repeatedly revealed that the learners are more likely to have anxiety in speaking compare with other language skills(E.Horwitz,2001;Melouah,2013).So how to help students deal with the language anxieties in the speaking has aroused much interest in the research.

Literature Review

Horwitz and Cope(1986)defined anxiety as“the subjective feeling of tension,apprehension,nervousness,and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system”(p.125).Language anxiety is a kind of felling which always takes place on the learners who are expected to learn and employ the second language or a foreign language.Students would become very nervous and perplexed and thus lead to a poor performance when they suffer from the language anxiety in the classroom,which may in turn create more anxiety and poorer performance.Most foreign language learners would not deny the fact that they have experienced the tension more often than not while learning a foreign language.

anxiety are Generally divided into three categories:trait anxiety,state anxiety,and situation specific anxiety.Trait anxiety refers to“a stable predisposition to become anxious in a wide range of situations”(Spielberger,1983,cited in MacIntyre,1995,p.93).State anxiety refers to“an immediate,transitory and emotional experience with immediate cognitive effects”(Spielberger,1983,cited in MacIntyre,1995,p.93).The term“situation specific anxiety”was coined by MacIntyre and Gardner(as cited in Horwitz,2001)and refers to the continuous and varied nature of some anxieties.Horwitz et al.(1986)classified foreign language anxiety into three components as:

1.Communication apprehension,which arises from learners’inability to adequately express mature thoughts and ideas.

2.Fear of negative social evaluation,which arises from a learner’s need to make a positive social impression on others.

3.Test anxiety,an apprehension about academic evaluation.

Horwitz et al.(1986)developed the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale(FLCAS).Many researchers then began to use or adapt the FLCAS to measure foreign language classroom anxiety among learners and tried to correlate anxiety to the language performance of the students.

as for the research of language anxiety in speaking,Phillip(1992)found that foreign language anxiety have a debilitating impact on their ability to speak it.And it should be of considerable concern to language educators and students not only on performance on oral test,but also on students’affective reaction and their attitudes towards language learning.Young(1991)stated in his research that some researchers found no relationship between anxiety and performance.Some researches even suggested that some anxiety enhanced oral performance.Stern(1997)discovered that anxiety in speaking could disturb the learners’behaviors in language study and language performance.Williams and Andrade(2008)found that asking questions by EFL or ESL teachers’in classrooms make students anxious.

The relationship between anxiety and oral performance is also a hot topic in China.CHEN Jie(1997)found that trait anxiety and environmental anxiety are negatively correlated with English oral performance.CHEN Yuming(2001)discovered that anxiety is the main factor that obstacles the college students in participating in the activities and discussion in oral English class.CHEN Yao&LI Changjiang(2007)investigated 86 college students from Niaoning Province and statistical results show that most of them felt a higher level of anxiety in oral English learning with distinct individual differences.GAO Xianli(2008)investigated 12 non-English majors and the results indicated that there was significant negative correlation between English learning anxiety and oral fluency.In other words,students with higher anxiety spoke more slowly,stopped more frequently,and yielded fewer acceptable sentences.XU Dan(2014)investigated 240 students and found that there was a significant negative correlation between language anxiety and oral English fluency.WANG Haizhen(2019)found that anxiety plays a mediating effect on the relationship between motivation and English speaking achievements．

as on how to reduce the language anxiety in oral performance,Foss&Reitzdels(1988)found that oral interpretation,oral reading of a script before an audience is a good way of handling communication anxiety in second language classrooms.Ntelioglou(2006)investigated the impact of integrated drama/ESL lessons on second language learners’language skills.And the research findings suggest that the integration of drama helped students cross borders of cultures,identities and literacies in the multicultural second language classroom.Fuentes(2010)study shows that drama performance has a positive effect for the learners’autonomous learning,motivation and pronunciation.Hasan Sağlamel & Mustafa Naci Kayaoğlu(2013)found that drama performance will reduce the students’language anxiety in oral performance.GU Xiaole,HUANG Furong&WANG Song(2004)made a theoretical discussion on improve the oral ability by using cooperative learning and drama performance.WU Junli(2009)found that prewriting preparation can effectively reduce students’language anxiety in spoken English classes and improve students’oral ability.WANG Tianjian(2013)found that the Classroom Speaking Anxiety is negatively correlated with the total number of words in Communication Units.What’s more SARM(Speaking Anxiety Reduction Model)can reduce speaking anxiety and increase the total number of words in Communication Units．LIAN Zhaoxia,WU Peng &LIU Yingli(2017)made an empirical study and found that APP can significantly alleviate the anxiety in oral English class.What’s more,the combination of APP and traditional oral English teaching can alleviate students’oral anxiety more than all-APP oral teaching.Even though there are lots of researches,the there are few empirical studies in reducing the foreign language anxiety of speaking English through drama performance.This study is concerned with investigating English language speaking anxiety among non-English major students in the Chinese local university.The following questions are addressed:

1.What is the current situation of Chinese students’speaking anxiety?

2.Is drama performance effective in alleviating the language anxiety in speaking?

Methodology

This research was designed to study the speaking anxiety specifically among Chinese undergraduates in the local university.So the participants were some freshmen of a local university in Zhejiang Province.

Subjects of the Study

This study was conducted in Huzhou University,Zhejiang Province.75 non-English major college students were selected in the School of Engineering.There are 19 female students and 56 male students.The ages of the students ranged from 18 to 20 years old.They need to study College English as it is a compulsory course for them.Their average score of English in the College Entrance Examination is 106,and the highest score is 137 and the lowest score is 59.This is in the agreement with the students’English levels of the whole university as the average score is 109.9 with 141 the highest and 26 the lowest.

Research Instruments

The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale(FLCAS)was used to the subjects.In order to make it clear,Foreign Language was replaced by English.FLCAS consists of 33 items that are scored in a 5-point Likert scale ranging from“Strongly agree”to“strongly disagree”.Of these items,8 items are scored reversely,that is to say,“strongly agree”indicates one point while“strongly disagree”indicates five points.These items are items No.2,5,8,11,14,18,22,28 and 32.The total scores of the scale range from 33 to 165.

In order to let the students express their own thoughts more freely,an online interview was carried out.19 students were randomly chosen and the questions in the interview mainly include:what factors make you feel nervous in speaking English? Did you feel nervous when you were performing the drama in English? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the drama performance in practising Oral English?What are the differences between the drama performance and other activities in Oral English teaching?

Research Procedure

In order to make the participants understand the items in the questionnaire completely,both English and Chinese are used for the items.Furthermore,the researcher provided explanation if there is any vague item that the participants were not sure.In October 2019,all the 75 students were asked to answer the FLCAS.Before they began to answer the questionnaires,the researcher told them about the objectives of the study and were encouraged to give the honest responses.Additionally,the participants were told that their answers would remain absolutely confidential.

Then the students were divided into groups of 4(with one group of three people)according to the principle of being heterogeneous within the group and being homogeneity among the groups.This means that the students’English levels in each group are different,but the English levels of groups are similar to each other.Once settled down,the students could not change to other groups at random during the experiment period.The students then decided the name and logo of their own groups.Each group would prepare four English dramas,with three of them unloaded online and one of them performed in class.

The assessment for the performance was done both by the teacher and the students.In order to be fair,the students from different class were asked to evaluate the online drama performance.That is to say,the students in class 1 assessed the online drama performance of class 2 and vice verse.The assessment was done in the name of groups.Specifically,members of each group need discuss to give a score for all the groups from the other groups.What’s more,they need describe their score briefly.The teacher scored for each group of their drama performance in class,but it didn’t mean that the students had nothing to do.They need to evaluate other groups’performance from the same class by stating the good points and weak points.As they were called randomly,for example No.2 from each group this time and No.3 next time.This required students to get well prepared and enhanced their opportunity to speak in English.The average scores from the teacher and other students would make up the final scores for the daily performance.

In January 2020,before the end of the class,the students were asked to answer the FLCAS for the second time.And one person from each group was chosen randomly to have the interview,but students from different levels were contained in the interview.

Results and Discussion

Results of the questionnaires

Zikmund et al.(2010)recommend the following threshold to interpret the values:scales with a coefficient alpha between 0.80 and 0.95 are considered to have very good reliability,those that have values between 0.60 and 0.70 have fair reliability,and values below 0.60 show poor reliability.The internal consistency of the research,as measured by Cronbach’s alpha coefficients,was 0.8264.The result suggests that the respondents were generally consistent in their opinions with regards to the questions in the questionnaires.

In this research,items related with communication apprehension are paid great attention while items related with test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation are not considered.In specific,the researcher focused on 17 items named item 1，3，4，9，13，14，15，18，20，23，24，27，29，30，31，32 and 33 of the questionnaire.The results before the experiments are shown below:

The average anxiety score of the students before the research is 3.62,with the highest one 4.11 and lowest one 3.21.And the following line graph shows the results of the post-research:

Chart 2 Anxiety levels of the Post-research

The average anxiety score of the students after the research is 3.18,with the highest one 3.72 and lowest one 2.48.Horwits(1986)thought that the learning efficiency will be reduced if one has too high anxiety level(3.6 and more)or too low anxiety level(2.8 and lower).The mediate anxiety level(between 2.8-3.6)will help one to achieve desirable learning efficiency.The average anxiety level of the students before the research is 3.62,which means that the students have high anxiety in speaking English.The average anxiety level of the students after the research is 3.18,a figure between 2.8 and 3.6,which means that the anxiety level is reduced and the anxiety in speaking English is controlled efficiently.

Results of the interview

The students put forward the advantages of performing English drama in Oral class in the interview as follows:

Firstly,the drama performance helps to solve the problem of being short in time.Because of the limited time,the time allocated for practising English is far from being enough.Meanwhile,many students have trouble in expressing themselves clearly and accurately,which leads to the poor preparation and shallow discussion.Drama performance requires students to make full use of the spare time after class,and they can prepare it accordingly.

Secondly,the drama performance helps to create the comparatively authentic context.As the drama is performed in the certain context,the students need to choose the appropriate language for real communication.On the one hand,it enriches the learning atmosphere.On the other hand,the oral practice is no longer to imitate or recite what the students have learned.

Thirdly,the drama performance helps to develop the students’creativity and enhance their confidence.In the process of preparing the drama,the students can utilize their own creativity and initiatives.For example,one group adapted the story,The Peacock Flies to the Southeast.In their drama,JIAO Zhongqing and LIU Lanzhi worked together and thought of all possible ways to persuade JIAO’s mother,who was finally moved and agreed about their marriage.Meanwhile,the comments from their peers are not only confined to language itself.They would praise the design of the story,the ability in performance and music,etc.These comments not only improve the students’confidence in learn English,but also increase their interest in learning English.

Of course,many students agreed that the choice for the drama would become more and more difficult as time went on because the commonly familiar ones would be occupied very quickly.They were challenged in choosing the drama they liked.

Conclusion

The results of the study indicated that the language anxiety in speaking for Chinese non-English majors is high and the dram performance did work in reducing the anxiety in speaking as it can increase the opportunity for practice and create a more relaxing atmosphere.However,there are some limitations for the study,for example,the period for the experiment is short,the group of the participants is small and more methods could be used,etc.These questions will be taken into consideration in the following research.

Acknowledgements

This paper is partially supported by the Project of Higher Education Teaching Reform of Zhejiang Province(jg 20160177).