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CLASS A
NURYANI
14B01049
GRADUATE PROGRAM
STATE UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR
2015
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INTRODUCTION
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interesting and makes condition of classroom comfortable so the students
can minimize anxiety of students as minimize as possible.
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DISCUSSION
A. Definition of Anxiety
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Based on the definitions above, the writer concludes that anxiety is
worried feeling, nervousness of someone and gives negative impact to her
performance. For some students, anxiety has positive impact. With anxiety,
they are motivated to study harder than usual.
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of time for personal attention, favoritism, a sense that the class does not
provide students with the tools necessary to match up with the teacher’s
expectations, and the sense of being judged by the teacher or wanting to
impress the teacher.
Young (1990: 5) noted that teaching too much grammar or avoiding
grammar altogether as well as using speaking activities that put the learner
“on the spot” in front of peers without allowing prior preparation are also
sources of anxiety for many students. Young (1990: 5) found that having a
native speaker for a teacher can cause anxiety, as the teacher may lack the
sensitivity of the learning process or the teacher may be hard to understand
in English.
A third source of foreign language anxiety is classroom procedures.
Young (2013: 6) compiled a list of classroom activities which are perceived
by students as producing anxiety:
(1) Spontaneous role play in front of the class;
(2) Speaking in front of the class;
(3) Oral presentations or skits in front of the class;
(4) Presenting a prepared dialogue in front of the class; and
(5) Writing work on the board. Error correction also turned out to play an
important role.
Those being negatively evaluated by either the teacher or peers is
often associated with anxiety. Young (1990:46) found the following
classroom characteristics to be anxiety-producing: demands of oral
production, feelings of being put on the spot, the pace of the class, and the
element of being evaluated (i.e., fear of negative evaluation).
Normazidah, Koo, & Hazita (2012); Trawiński (2005), also
presented the factors that impact the EFL learners to have poor performance
in English language learning as followings:
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English is regarded as a difficult subject to learn.
Learners’ learning depends on the English teachers as authorities.
There is a lack of support to use English in the home environment
and the community.
Learners have insufficient or lacking of exposure to the language as
there is a limited opportunity to use English outside the classrooms
Students have a limitation of vocabulary proficiency as well as
English reading materials are not always available.
Learners have an unwillingness and lack of motivation to learn
English as they do not see the immediate need to use the language.
Lack of motivation for learning or the negative attitude towards the
target language.
Chang (2010), indicated that reasons cause students’ weakness for
English language learning derived from learners’ laziness, lack of
efficiency of the school, and insufficient of parents’ promotions. Moreover,
according to Dembo (2004), specifies that time management is involved in
students’ educational achievement; for instance, students with better time-
management skills tend to have higher grade-point average (GPA) than
students with poorer time-management skills. Alderman (2004), states to
the students’ poor performance of language learning are affected from a
lack of effort, lack of effective learning strategies, whereas a good language
learner is a highly motivated students and a successful user of a large
number of different strategies (Trawiński, 2005).So, teachers have to help
them improve the motivational beliefs and language learning strategies in
order to find ways that reach to their academic achievement. Therefore, to
these key factors, all stakeholders should find ways to solve the problems
for learners’ academic achievements.
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Other important causes of anxiety among the language learners are
stated by MacIntyre and Gardner (1991) as follows:
C. Types of anxiety
Anxiety can be divided into three types: trait anxiety, state anxiety
and situation-specific anxiety. Trait anxiety is the tendency of a person to
be nervous or feel anxious irrespective of the situation he/ she is exposed to.
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Indeed, such anxiety is a part of a person’s character and hence is
permanent and difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of. A person who is
trait anxious is likely to feel anxious in a variety of situations.
The second type of anxiety is referred to as state (situational)
anxiety. As the name implies, this types of anxiety arises in the particular
situation and hence is not permanent. It is nervousness or tension at a
particular moment in response to some outside stimulus, it occurs because
learners are exposed to a particular situation or event that is stressful of
them. For example, there are some learners who feel anxious if they are
called by the teacher to speak in the classroom. The good thing about this
type of anxiety is that it diminishes over time as the learner’s get used to the
new environment or feel comfortable with the teacher. As a result, although
state anxiety can prevent a learner from showing his/her full potential, it is
not as harmful as trait anxiety. Finally, the last of the three types, situation-
specific anxiety is related to apprehension unique to specific situations and
events.
Language anxiety is a distinct complex of self perceptions, beliefs,
feelings and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from
the uniqueness of the language learning process (Horwitz, Horwitz, &
Cope, 1986). Drawing upon the synthesis of previous research on foreign
language anxiety, Gardner and MacIntyre (1993) describe the concept as
the apprehension experienced when a specific situation requires the use of a
second language in which the individual is not fully proficient. To sum up,
language anxiety falls under the category of situation- specific anxiety.
Foreign language anxiety has three varieties and it will be explained as
follows:
a) Communication apprehension occurs in cases where learners lack
mature communication skills although they have mature ideas and
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thoughts. It refers to a fear of getting into real communication with
others.
b) Test anxiety, on the other hand, is an apprehension towards
academic evaluation. It could be defined as a fear of failing in tests
and an unpleasant experience held either consciously or
unconsciously by learners in many situations. This type of anxiety
concerns apprehension towards academic evaluation which is based
on a fear of failure (Horwitz and Young, 1991).
c) Fear of negative evaluation is observed when foreign language
learners feel incapable of making the proper social impression and it
is an apprehension towards evaluations by others and avoidance of
evaluative situations. The research also aims to investigate the levels
and sources of fear of negative evaluation on the part of EFL
learners, and it focuses on the relationship between language anxiety
and fear of negative evaluation among EFL learners.
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English at two universities in central Japan. All the respondents were
requested to answer an open-ended questionnaire and asked to write down
the specific strategies they used to deal with their foreign language anxiety.
The study initially identified 373 specific strategies but reduced this to 70
due to “the elimination of duplicate ones (defined as nearly identical in
wording)”. The specific strategies mentioned by the students were grouped
under five categories of general strategies, namely: preparation, relaxation,
positive thinking, peer seeking and resignation. The five categories will be
explained as follows:
1) Preparation is the first category, it refers to attempts at controlling
the impending threat by improving learning and study strategies (e.g.
studying hard, trying to obtain good summaries of lecture notes).
Use of these strategies would be expected to increase students’
subjectively estimated mastery of the subject matter, and hence
reduce the anxiety associated with the language class.
2) Relaxation is the second category; it involves tactics that aim at
reducing somatic anxiety symptoms. Typical items are ‘I take a deep
breath’ and ‘I try to calm down’.
3) Positive Thinking is the third strategy set; it is characterized by its
palliative function of suppressing problematic cognitive processes
that underlie students’ anxiety (e.g. imagining oneself giving a great
performance, trying to enjoy the tension). These strategies are
intended to divert attention from the stressful situation to positive
and pleasant cues, and bring relief to the anxious student.
4) Peer seeking is the fourth category; it is distinguished by students’
willingness to look for other students who seem to have trouble
understanding the class and/or controlling their anxiety. For the
anxious student, the realization that others are having the same
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problem may serve as a source of emotional regulation by social
comparison.
5) Resignation is the final strategy set. This category is characterized
by students’ reluctance to do anything to alleviate their language
anxiety (e.g. giving up, sleeping in class). Students reporting
examples of Resignation seem intent on minimizing the impact of
anxiety by refusing to face the problem.
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CONCLUSION
Anxiety is worried feeling, nervousness of someone and gives
negative impact to her performance. For some students, anxiety has positive
impact. With anxiety, they are motivated to study harder than usual.
There are a number of ways that learning a foreign language can
cause anxiety for the language learner. They are pressure by parents and
teachers to get good grades at school in English, lack of confidence in their
ability to learn English, fear of making mistakes and subsequent
punishment or ostracism, i.e., fear of losing face for not being perfect,
conditioning in childhood to believe that English is an extremely difficult
language to learn, fear of foreigners and their behavior.
Anxiety can be divided into three types: trait anxiety, state anxiety
and situation-specific anxiety. Situation-specific anxiety also has three
varieties; they are communication apprehension, text anxiety, and fear of
the negative evaluation.
There are five specific categories of strategies to cope the learners’
language anxiety. They are preparation, relaxation, positive thinking, peer
seeking, and resignation.
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REFERENCES
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