A case study on collaborative group activities to reduce EFL learners' foreign langauge speaking anxiety in a university context

A great number of educators experience some affective factors in educational settings. These factors mostly effective on the learners' attitudes, motivation and efforts to achieve the goals of language learning process. These factors also play a hinderer role to grasp the newly learned items into the mind by constructing a mental block against the upcoming process. As educators, our responsibility is to provide learners with an effective classroom environment in which learners can express their ideas freely, adopt a high motivation and positive attitudes towards language learning and become successful language learners. Our role is also to be a moderator to facilitate learning and enable learners to use appropriate strategies to achieve the goals of language learning more successfully. The goal of the present study was to investigate these possible affective factors causing to the Turkish students' anxiety arousal in English speaking classes. In the light of the findings of the instruments used for identifying the sources of anxiety a case study was conducted. Within this case study an action research was embedded to eliminate the factors negatively affecting students' feelings and attitudes towards constructing communicative language skills. In doing so, two research questions were built up to seek for possible answers throughout the survey. The sources of anxiety were identified by the items of FLCAS and focus group interview questions. Then, some small group collaborative activities were conducted throughout 6 weeks in the class and students were told to keep personal diaries to take notes about the effectiveness of the activities. As a researcher teacher, I also kept a journal to take notes about my observations I noticed during the process of teaching implementations. The findings of the instruments demonstrated that the reasons of anxiety-arousal of the learners were various and flexible. But still, three main categories were identified to present results more explicitly. The origins of the anxiety were personal and interpersonal reasons, teachers' beliefs about language teaching and classroom procedures. The ideas of the learners for the activities also showed that small group collaborative activities work well in foreign language classes.