Reducing Students' Foreign Language Anxiety in Speaking Class Through Cooperative Learning

One of the challenges in teaching English as a foreign language to students in Indonesia is the existence of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) that are faced by students at any level of education. FLA has hindered the students in mastering English, especially in Speaking Skill, it is shown by their performances in the class which are too nervous, shy, unwilling to participate and lack of confidence.Gardner and McIntyre,(1987) stated that FLA negatively impacts the quality of learning and is a critical factor in learners' success or failure in learning a foreign language. Based on the aforementioned statements, it means reducing students' language anxiety can enhance their overall learning experience and improve motivation and achievement.Thus, for many years, some researchers have attempted to find the most suitable techniques and methods to help students overcome this problem. Some of which is by providing them a conducive learning environment, the culture of caring and of course, a non-threatening atmosphere in the classroom. For that reason, this paper isintended to propose a technique to reduce the students' anxiety; that is cooperative learning. By using cooperative learning, it is expected that it can overcome this problem, as this technique offers a good language-learning environment in which the process of learning dealing with cooperativeness rather than competitiveness. This is in line with Krashen (1982). He, through his Affective Filter Hypothesis, contends that one of the factors of language acquisition to happen is in a low-filter language-learning environment

Global issues and global values in foreign language education : selection and awareness-raising

The global education trend has recently been gaining in significance in education systems throughout the world. This paper discusses a number of issues regarding the possibility of incorporating a global perspective into foreign language education, and considering also some of the implications of this for language teacher education Firstly, I shall describe my former teaching context – a pre-service foreign language teacher training course at the Belarusian State Pedagogical University in Minsk, Belarus. Then, I shall briefly discuss the concept of global education and its particular relevance to foreign language teaching, focusing on global issues and values as ways of incorporating a global perspective into foreign language education. Next, I shall report on and discuss the findings of my 2001 study of EFL teachers’ attitudes to certain aspects of the incorporation of a global perspective into foreign language education

Motivated Spanish learning among Anglo-Texan high school students : an exploration of theories, research, and experience, with implications for pedagogy

textResearch into foreign language and second language learning motivation has progressed steadily over the past half century. Several theories and models have been developed to explain how learners are motivated to learn a foreign language. Context-specific research, however, is lacking for Anglo-Texan high school students learning Spanish. This report applies the theories of foreign language learning motivation to this context, using personal experience and anecdotes from the author as a Spanish teacher and student, in order to prescribe pedagogical applications of the research for high school Spanish teachers in Texas who seek to increase their students' motivation.Curriculum and Instructio

Talker identification is not improved by lexical access in the absence of familiar phonology

Listeners identify talkers more accurately when they are familiar with both the sounds and words of the language being spoken. It is unknown whether lexical information alone can facilitate talker identification in the absence of familiar phonology. To dissociate the roles of familiar words and phonology, we developed English-Mandarin “hybrid” sentences, spoken in Mandarin, which can be convincingly coerced to sound like English when presented with corresponding subtitles (e.g., “wei4 gou3 chi1 kao3 li2 zhi1” becomes “we go to college”). Across two experiments, listeners learned to identify talkers in three conditions: listeners' native language (English), an unfamiliar, foreign language (Mandarin), and a foreign language paired with subtitles that primed native language lexical access (subtitled Mandarin). In Experiment 1 listeners underwent a single session of talker identity training; in Experiment 2 listeners completed three days of training. Talkers in a foreign language were identified no better when native language lexical representations were primed (subtitled Mandarin) than from foreign-language speech alone, regardless of whether they had received one or three days of talker identity training. These results suggest that the facilitatory effect of lexical access on talker identification depends on the availability of familiar phonological forms

The Language Laboratory and Teaching English at the College Level in Japan

A recommendation made by the Central Council on Education inJapan states that in foreign language education the main concentrationshould be placed on the development of practical abilities. LanguageLaboratory facilities are becoming widespread in Japan as one of the mosteffective methods of meeting the needs of foreign language training

Odnos in motiviranost mlajsih ucencev do ucenja tujega jezika

This paper focuses on young foreign language learners’ attitudes and motivations. An overview is given of the main issues in this research area, based on key European studies. Approaches to studying these affective learner characteristics are described. Some attention is devoted to data elicitation techniques and the importance of triangulation. Research findings are presented through overviews of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies carried out in different European settings. The latter are presented in more detail, because their findings seem to be more revealing of the early foreign language learning process. The overall conclusion of this review paper is that young foreign language learners’ attitudes and motivations are not stable learner characteristics but change over time, creating layers of complexity that warrant further research. Suggestions about possible future directions in researching young foreign language learner attitudes and motivations, and the application of its findings are also made. (DIPF/Orig.

The perception of English-accented polish – a pilot study

•Does familiarity with a specific foreign language facilitate the recognition and identification of that accent in foreign-accented Polish