Response to Discussion #3: Communication apprehension

How does learner anxiety, or "communication apprehension," affect foreign language learning?  What is your experience as a learner, have you ever felt such an anxiety? Can anxiety play a positive role in learning? What can be done to alleviate anxiety in the classroom?

We touched briefly on the role of anxiety in learning during our last class in the context of Monitor theory, which says that anxiety needs to be low but not nonexistent for effective learning to occur.  This matches up well with what I’ve experienced personally while learning a language.  If there is no anxiety, that means you are not outside of your comfort zone, and there is very little progress to be made when you are in territory with which you are already familiar.  Getting pushed outside this comfort zone naturally involves some anxiety, but that is also when the learning occurs, and that is where the positive role of anxiety in learning comes into play.

For most of my life, I was never a fan of speaking in class, so speaking in a foreign language in class was not my favorite either.  I have felt the anxiety that comes before opening your mouth in any language – even when you plan ahead of time what you are going to say, you might get nervous and mess it all up.  I spoke to a friend of mine about her experience in anxiety in her high school French classes.  She took 3 years of French and reflects that she could read and write well but speaking was much harder.  She aced exams but her presentation and participation grades were miserable.  Her teacher, she added, wasn’t very kind when correcting her speech, and as a result she just stopped talking in class.  There are a lot of other variables in play here apart from communication apprehension, but if you are made to feel bad about your mistakes, who would want to continue to participate in a language class?

As a teacher, I think there are small changes you can make to alleviate the anxiety of your students.  I try to make a point of thanking the students who make an effort to answer the question.  Even if I have to move on to another student in the end, I try to remember to say “Gracias Steve y Anna” and include whoever made a good effort.  When I move on to other students often tell them when they are close, or say that I understand where they are coming from (only if I actually understand their thought process, I might add).  I also pick my grammar battles, so to speak; if I corrected all the errors in a sentence uttered by a beginning speaker I would spend way too much class time and I would make the person feel bad.  I pick the most important mistakes based either on what we’re learning at that moment or what I know they should already know, or both.  And there are certainly ways to phrase my criticism that makes it constructive and not negative.  I also find that students enjoy when I tell personal stories about mess-ups or confusion I had when learning the language.  If they feel that their teacher is a human being that makes them feel like they are allowed to be, too.