Coping with Anxiety Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety a. Types of Anxiety
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“intertwine the organizational grammatical, discourse aspects of language with the pragmatic functional, sociolinguistic, strategic aspects.
2. Relationship of form and function Teaching should engage learners’ inpragmatic and functional use of language
where the language is used for a meaningful purpose. 3. Fluency and accuracy
Focus is on flow of comprehension and production. “At times fluency may have to take on more importance than accuracy in order to keep learners meaningfully
engaged in language use”. Accuracy and correctness is, of course, a factor and it is the teachers’ responsibility “to offer appropriate corrective feedback on
learners errors”. 4. Focus on real-world contexts
The language ultimately has to be used outside of the classroom, both receptively and productively, in unrehearsed contexts. “Classroom tasks must therefore equip
learners with the skills necessary for communication in those contexts”. 5. Autonomy and strategic involvement
Learners should be afforded the opportunity and support needed to focus on their own learning processes “through raising their awareness of their own styles of
learning […] and through the development of appropriate strategies for production and comprehension”. This awareness ought to help to develop
autonomous learners who can continue to develop their language skills beyond the classroom.
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6. Teacher’s roles One should be a guide, or facilitator of learning refers to the process of helping
learners achieve self-growth through self-evaluation and cooperation with others. Additional descriptors of facilitation include assisting, freeing, aiding, guiding,
and empowering learners in the learning process. Put simply, facilitation is the process of helping adults learn., and not a dictionary. “The teacher is an
empathetic coach who values the learners linguistic development. They are encouraged to construct meaning through genuine linguistic interaction with other
students and with the teacher”. 7. Student’s roles
Learners are “active participants in their own learning process. Learner-centered, cooperative, collaborative learning is emphasized, but not at the expense of
appropriate teacher-centered activity” To emphasize one of the aforementioned points then the role of a learner is
that of a “negotiator – between the self, the learning process, and the object of learning” Richards Rodgers RR 2001:166. Meaning is everything in CLT,
that is to say that dialogues “center around communicative functions and are not normally memorized” Finocchiaro Brumfit as cited in Brown 2007:49.
The goal in CLT is communicative competence and any device or task which assists in ascertaining that goal should be tried. Fluency and acceptable language are
primary goals; accuracy is judged not in the abstract but in context” Finocchiaro Brumfit as cited in Brown 2007:49.