Effects of Foreign Language Anxiety

22 with others, thereby the teacher should enable them to build up their confidence and self-esteem, while at the same time making their learning enjoyable. Nimmannit 1998 comments on this in her work explaining what a typical class in an EFL classroom is; she describes how students are sitting in neat rows listening attentively to the teacher and obediently following each stage of the teachers instructions. The teacher directs questions to specific students, and occasionally calls for volunteers, but students generally seem reluctant to respond. She also explains that students will be more motivated if they are exposed to activities to which they can relate, which encourage them to use the target language, and which allow them to choose what they want to say. Hernandez-Herrero 2005 discusses in his study, the importance of using different contexts and settings in the classroom in order to help students from the University of Costa Rica when acquiring English oral production skills. The researcher’s findings show that many students think oral presentations is helpful to improve their oral production skills because they prepare their assignments and topics more carefully; that is, they feel that facing the whole class requires more of them than working in small groups. In addition, even though they feel nervous, oral presentations give them the opportunity to practice public-speaking techniques, skills which they consider very important for students who plan to teach in the future. The implementation of hot seat is different from each level. In the first and second semester, the students are still given a chance to prepare the material that they are going to talk. Meanwhile in third and fourth semester, the students have to 23 perform without any preparation. Actually, it is based on the lecturer’s choice whether it will be planned or impromptu. What is seen from hot seat activity is the student’s performance to see their competence in speaking skill. Hot Seat game deals with the theory from Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky 1965 defines linguistic competence as the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language which makes it possible for speakers to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. He differentiates linguistic competence from linguistic performance, claiming that the later has to do with the use of language. Linguistic competence is the speakers’ unconscious knowledge of the grammar of his or her native language while linguistic performance has to do with the actual production and comprehension of utterances. Chomsky separates competence, an idealized capacity, from the production of actual utterances, performance. Communicative Language Teaching marked a departure from traditional language teaching as CLT views that learning is learned through the process of struggling to communicate Finocchiaro Brumfit as cited in Brown 2007:49. In his book, Teaching by Principles, Brown lists 7characteristics of the CLT approach. They are as follows: 1. Overall goals CLT focuses on all components of communicative competence grammatical, discourse, functional, sociolinguistic, and strategic. All goals should therefore 24 “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.