Dear Ivana, thank You for sharing Your research results, I am also interested in this issue. May I ask about the questionnaires used in the research, who designed them and may I have a look at them?

Thank You.

Elena

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Dear Ivana, I would also be interested in the topic. Thanks a million in advance.

And greetings from Austria, Birgit

"Affective" basically means emotional, or relating to moods and feelings.  There is a lot of literature that shows that when students experience success, and thus have positive feelings about their experiences, they are better motivated to study.

So, classroom activities must be crafted to allow students to succeed.  If they are too hard, students will be discouraged.

I am a native English speaker who has traveled in Asia and visited several universities. One of my personal priorities in such visits is to help students have positive experiences interacting with an English native speaker. 

Dear Michael, would it be possible to share some of your activites related  to emotion with us? With the Kids on Primary level I very much work with these aspects, make them feel good, not force them, make them play and laugh and do competitive tasks. German for many Migrant Kids is a nightmare and I try to male them emotionally comfortable with it. However, is there any literature you can suggest on this? Thanks so much! Greetings from Munich

Since this type of strategy is oriented towards the learners' inner self, there is no objective way in which affective strategy employment on the part of the learners can be ensured. Once it is ensured, it is expected to reduce any psychological barriers that the learners might be experiencing. Especially, with low proficiency, the teacher must refrain from holding the floor for too long, must mediate, keep the classroom less teacher fronted, foster cooperative  learning atmosphere, and more importantly modify the input so that self talk , self reinforcement and self encouragement can be achieved.

Also, research shows that all- female classes taught by female teachers are more communicative while male dominated classes tend to be more assertive in classroom discourse.

I am not a English teacher but I think we can use same strategies for every foreign languages. I got some clues when I joined my friend's classes sometimes. He is a professional English teacher in Hanoi and usually makes students act with some missions. They really enjoyed it and there were no fears to speak English. 

In my opinion, the most important strategy for foreign language is fun activities. Let your students do something with their classmates in English. I am pretty sure it works.

Dear colleagues,

Thank you very much for your comments. These are all useful.

While researching this issue I used R. Oxford's SILL questionnaire and in that way I found out that my students very rarely or almost never use affective learning strategies while speaking L2. Then I asked them to write me about it in their Learning Journal and explain what problems they face with while speaking English in the class, how do they feel in those moments, what kind of help they would prefer in those situations and so on. At first, I asked them to write their Learning Journals in English, but it was not productive, then, after consulting some of my colleagues, I asked them to write it in Serbian (L1). Eventually, it was very productive and I found out what problems they encountered and what thoughts they had during those classes when we practiced speaking and led some discussions. This is how I found out what kind of problems they came up against during speaking classes. Some of them I mentioned when I posted a question.

Now, I would like to find some ideas to solve these problems, find challenging activities that will motivate my students to participate in discussions, then I would like to improve my teaching and help my students to speak more fluent English.

Thank you all in advance,

Ivana

Dear Ivana,

This is just a tip. Give your students a topic to think about and then ask them to talk about it. It could be about fashion, politics, law, nutrition, holidays, places they have visited or want to visit etc., and tell them that their English doesn't have to be perfect and not to be ashamed if they make mistakes because it is normal to make mistakes when learning and that eventually they will get better and better but they have to speak and speak. 

thanks for sharing it. I will be glad to apply some of them in my classes.

I like to take Liljana's idea further to suggest using group work before individual presentaion. As Dörnyei (1994) notes, group work with a cooperative mode can decrease students’ anxiety by creating a supportive learning environment, which is a pre-requirement for L2 learning. This echoes my findings from investigating 14-15 year-old students' views. They commented that they like discussions; they feel them interesting; discussions can reduce nervousness and are relaxing. Another benefit of group discussion, as Crandall (1999) comments, is that it allows students to have several opportunities to rehearse before they present to larger class, and thus feel secure. this aspect was pointed out by my interviewed students.

Thank you very much Yi-Mei and other colleagues.

This was also something that my university students brought up in the interview. I am glad that we have some matching of the analyzed data. One more thing to add, my students expressed the greatest concern about the way their peers will react to their willingness to participate in the discussion. Namely, some of them said that they do not choose to participate in the discussion or say an opinion in English because their peers will laugh if they make a mistake or they afraid that if they speak for a longer time, they "will say something stupid". According to this, I might, with  caution, conclude that they afraid more of their peers' comments than of the teacher's suggestion of how to improve their fluency in the target language.

Here I uploaded the Table of my data collected by using Rebeca's Oxford SILL (1990) questionnaire. I would be glad to compare the results to those of your students'. In the given Table it could be clearly seen that affective strategies are used at least and this could account for the anxiety students possess while speaking English in front of other people in the class. 

Dear colleagues, I would like to research this issue further (it could be interesting to compare the results collected in different universities, schools, surroundings) and those of you who are willing to help me, could give their students SILL questionnaire and then we can compare the results. Also, this could be a start to write a paper together and then publish it.

I will wait for your responses on this.

Thanks in advance.

Best wishes to all,

Ivana