Foreign Language Anxiety and Its Countermeasures in Teaching

With the teaching focus shifted from teacher-centered to learner-centerned, learners are considered to be active individuals and play an important role in language learning activities. Therefore, individual differences stand out and foreign language anxiety has been identified as one of the most important. Research findings have consistently demonstrated that foreign language anxiety impairs the language competence and performance of those learners who usually suffer from a far greater amount of anxiety. In this paper, after theories about foreign language anxiety are presented, its operating mechanism is discussed by Eysenck and Schwarzer's Theory and Tobias theory in which cognitive effects of anxiety are explained at length. Its potential sources are explored such as fear of negative evaluation, low self-esteem and self-perceived ability, etc., and then effective countermeasures in teaching are proposed to alleviate the higher level of foreign language anxiety Chinese students are experiencing in their foreign language learning.