to Learners with Special Educational Needs

Pokrivčáková, S. et al. (2015). Teaching Foreign Languages to Learners with Special Educational Needs:
e-textbook for foreign language teachers. Nitra: Constantine the Philosopher University. 128 p.
ISBN 978-80-558-0941-0
3. Give yourself a reward after accomplishing the task.
4. If you are anxious when speaking in front of people, imagine that those are you friends and it
is an informal chat. (Many students tend to imagine cabbage heads or different objects
instead of the people in the audience.)
5. Write down your feelings or let your teacher know about how you feel.
Moreover, relaxation techniques are becoming more and more discussed nowadays. Deep
breathing, meditation or getting moving are some of the examples. Robinson et al. (2015)
suggest progressive muscle relaxation, visualization meditation, yoga or tai chi as further
techniques how to overcome stress and alleviate anxiety from the longitudinal point of view.
The above mentioned recommendations and strategies may be very helpful in the classroom
but it is important to bear in mind that all the students are different in their feelings and
manifestation and each student requires different approach from the teacher.
Conclusion
It is human and natural to feel stress or anxiety in certain situations. However, it is important
to be able to cope with the negative feelings so that they do not affect one´s learning and
performance.
According to the above mentioned researches, anxiety, which is present among the students
of FL, negatively influences students´ acquisition of FL and further performance. Although
anxiety is an abstract term, it can be observed by students in a form of blushing, rubbing the
palms, perspiration, staggered voice, either too slow or too fast speech, poor performance,
forgetfulness etc. Students are very individual and therefore, the signs may differ in their
manifestation or severity. That is, some learners may completely forget what they have learnt
and be unable to perform in any way (oral or written) or some learners need only small hint,
help or motivation to be able to perform with imperceptible signs of anxiety.
There are many factors such as classroom environment and its atmosphere, learners´ selfesteem,
the evaluation coming from the classmates, etc. that are the source of anxiety. Students
themselves declared the strictness and formality of the classroom as the major factor of FLA.
Moreover, the teacher´s attitudes or favouritism cause FLA as well. Therefore, the role of the
teacher is even more important, because the teacher is the person in the classroom who can
regulate the atmosphere, search for the signs of anxiety and help students to overcome it.
Although the results of the researches were similar in demonstrating the presence of anxiety
in the classrooms and its negative effect on FL, more studies need to be done in this area to
investigate the interplay of various contributing variables as the exact nature of this relationship
is still blurry and may be influenced by various concomitant factors.
Acknowledgement
The chapter presents the partial results of the KEGA 036UKF-4/2013 project funded by the
Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic.
References
AIDA, Y. (1994). Examination of Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope’s construct of foreign language
anxiety: The case of students of Japanese. The Modern Language Journal, 78, 155-167.
AL-SARAJ T. M. (2011). Foreign language anxiety: What is it? Paper presented at 4th Bloomsbury
Student Conference in Applied Linguistics. Birkbeck College, University of London, the UK. 2-3.
Available at:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=02s0WsMAAAAJ&
citation_for_view=02s0WsMAAAAJ:d1gkVwhDpl0C.
ARGAMAN, O. & ABU-RABIA, S. (2002). The influence of language anxiety on English reading and
writing tasks among native Hebrew speakers. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 15, 143-160.
97