Anxiety in  the classsrom

1.The research problem is that students feel anxious during the learning process and it impedes students to acquire a successful learning.

2  anxiety         Foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) is considered to be a situational anxiety experienced in the well-defined situation of the foreign language classroom (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991a, 1991b, 1994). According to Horwitz, Horwitz and cope (1991) possible causes of FLCA are communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation.

3   problem statement Some students are unsuccessful in learning a foreign language, anxiety is a big obstacle that prevents learners from concentrating and participating in classroom activities.

    Learners from Cecilia de Lleras school, at sixth grade, when attending English lessons, feel less successful and  experience extensive nervousness while having to speak in front of their classmates, some even have the urge to skip class rather than risk being laughed at . Others become so anxious that they begin to sweat and feel nausea.

  4   pupose statement The aim of this study will be to explore the causes of feelings is to Foreign Language Classroom anxiety (FLCA) and how it affects their learning processes. This research will be carried out at the Institución Educativa Cecilia de Lleras; the population will be 38 students from sixth grade. Questionnaires and interviews will be used to collect data. This study will be about how anxiety affects the learning process of sixth grade students from Cecilia de Lleras School when attending English classes. Teachers and students participated in this study, they helped us to understand how this phenomenon occurs in real time and made us conscious as future teachers to what we are going to face with our students.

5     significance of the study    This study will be important for English learners because it encourages them to be more active and control nervousness, anxiety in order to learn in a better way. This study will help English language teachers to create more dynamic classes to male students feel relaxed and in the best attitude to learn.

6.    method It was an intrinsic case study, because the anxiety for the study was one of interest in the particular case itself. This places the research solidly within the qualitative domain and more specifically within the tradition of case study research, which, as Creswell (1998, p. 61) notes, involves “an exploration of a “bounded system” or a case (or multiple cases) over time through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information rich in context”.

In view of the unexplored areas of FLCA, the following research questions were formulated to guide the study:

—        What are the attitudes that learners have when attending English classes?

—        How can anxiety hinder the English Learning Process?

—        What are the causes that influence the anxiety of the students in a foreign language classroom?

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