Decreasing Anxiety among Communication Arts EFL Students Through Peer Teaching and Activities
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Abstract
This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study aimed to create classroom activities that can lead to the reduction of speaking, listening, reading, and writing anxieties in English language learning of Thai undergraduates major in Communication Arts in a university in Thailand. Four widely-used anxiety scales were utilized such as Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS) by Kim (2000) for listening anxiety, Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA) by McCroskey (1982) for speaking anxiety, Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) by Saito et al. (2009) for reading anxiety, and Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) by Cheng (2004) for writing anxiety. Results of the study reveal that the participants are more anxious with their receptive skills (listening and reading, M=3.49 and M=3.39 respectively) as compared with their productive skills (speaking and writing, M=3.35 and M=3.38 respectively). Moreover, the highest anxiety provoking situations in each language skill include inability to differentiate words in listening (M=3.73), inability to understand what is being read (M=3.62), using English in writing a composition (M=3.67), and forgetting facts while speaking (M=3.57). The above findings are crucial on how language teaching is designed this ongoing semester.
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