Summer 2013 - The Independent Schools' Modern Language ...

Action Research: Using Skype to reduce oralexam
anxiety
My Year 10 Spanish group of 14 students is mixed ability for the Independent
context. Although all are keen to succeed, it was following a routine end of
term speaking assessment that I stopped to think about why so many of
them dreaded orals. To start with a measurable, I asked the girls to do the
Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale questionnaire (1), which explicitly
assesses feelings such as fear, embarrassment and confusion generated in
the language classroom. A score over 99/165 denotes a high level of anxiety,
and I found that 6 out of 14 girls had scores well above this.
So what could I do to help to reduce their anxiety? Naturally, we do oral and
pair work in class, but I was convinced it was the absence of opportunities for
sustained dialogue that was the problem, as well as the fact that they tend to
gravitate towards a partner of similar confidence levels. Without the benefit
of a language assistant, I needed to find a way to make them experience one
-to-one conversations much more frequently, so that when oral exams next
came round, they didn’t feel like such an unusual and stressful experience.
This was where Skype came in.
Every two weeks, girls now come to a computer suite, set up their webcams
and headsets, and call each other. They have 3-4 conversations a lesson,
each lasting 10-15 minutes. Following evaluations completed after each session,
I modify subsequent tasks, giving them a mixture of pre-prepared or
guided conversations and spontaneous “free talking”. In a 55 minute lesson,
all students speak for a good 45 minutes, only breaking when I tell them to
say “¡adiós!” and to call the next person on their list. Each girl has a Spanish
code name so it’s a surprise who will answer their call (in each lesson, they
are sometimes the stronger and sometimes the weaker participant) and, to
ensure they are not approachable by strangers online, a set of class accounts
were set up by the ICT department with suitably generic names (e.g. gtyskype-01,
etc).
Reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, with one girl saying “it’s the
most fun, relaxing Spanish lesson we do” though admittedly she was the one
with the lowest FLCA score to begin with. The girl with the highest FLCA score
reported for the first few sessions that it was “silly” and “no different to talking
face-to-face”, but after five sessions, she admitted it was “less intimidating”
and “very useful” oral exam practice. The majority response is that they
feel “more comfortable” and “more confident”, find it “beneficial”, “helpful
and fun”, and most commonly, that they speak “much more Spanish than in
(1) Horwitz, E. K., Horwitz, M. B., & Cope, J., Foreign language classroom anxiety (1986: The Modern
Language Journal, 70 (2), 125-132)
19