Volume 29, Issue 2
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.208
ALLEVIATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ANXIETY OF COLLEGE ENGLISH LEARNERS IN WRITING THROUGH BLENDED TEACHING
Abstract
The psychological anxiety in English writing directly affects the writing performance of English learners. This paper aims to clarify the level of psychological anxiety of English majors in writing, and evaluates the ability of blended teaching to alleviate the anxiety. Therefore, a questionnaire survey was carried out among 124 English majors that had received traditional teaching of English writing for one semester. Their attitudes to English writing and teaching method were analyzed based on the survey results. Then, two classes of English majors were selected for a comparative experiment, with one class receiving the blended teaching of English writing and the other, the traditional teaching method. The anxiety and performance in English writing of both classes were measured before and after the experiment. The results show that most students receiving traditional teaching of English writing had severe psychological anxiety in finishing writing tasks; blended teaching provides English majors a secure and flexible learning environment, which significantly alleviates their psychological anxiety in all dimensions: somatic anxiety, evaluation anxiety, avoidance behavior and self-confidence anxiety. The research results show a new direction for English teaching reform in colleges.
Keywords
Psychological Anxiety, College English Learners, Writing, Blended Teaching.