Anxiety in English Language Learning

Anxiety in English language learning (ELL) has been the focus of educational research for more than 70 years. However, few previous studies target practical suggestions on student anxiety management specifically for stakeholders such as language teachers, language teacher educators, and continuing professional development (CPD) providers. This chapter presents some practical suggestions for changing debilitating ELL anxiety into facilitating anxiety for these stakeholders, students, and their parents. As shown by previous studies, anxiety can inhibit students from understanding and producing good English as well as affecting their learning process. However, it should also be emphasized that anxiety is not always debilitating; it may also facilitate learning by motivating learners to work hard on English learning tasks. Therefore, all relevant stakeholders need to know more about ELL anxiety. This chapter is helpful for these stakeholders since it proposes that students do not need to worry about ELL anxiety too much; instead, teachers may help them to transform ELL anxiety into a positive resource. This chapter also provides English teachers with ideas for classroom activities and practical suggestions for action research in the TESOL classroom to deal with anxiety. These suggestions may be useful for teachers, teacher educators, and CPD providers since they can help teachers to achieve more success in decreasing students’ ELL anxiety.