Catálogo de Investigaciones | 2013-2014

131 CATÁLOGO DE INVESTIGACIONES | AÑO ACADÉMICO 2013 -2014 The Effect of Communicative Language Teaching Activities on the Levels of Anxiety of English Language Learners in a Conversational English Course at a Community College in Puerto Rico Language anxiety is the affective factor that most obstructs the learning process, as a negative energy that affects the ability to hold words and ideas long enough to speak them into suitably communicative utterances (Arnold and Brown, 1999). Krashen (2003) declared that the best teaching approaches and methods are those that provide a “comprehensible input” in low anxiety situations. Communicative Language Teaching classroom activities must encourage learners in communication processes such as information sharing, negotiation of meaning and interaction (Brown, 2007). This research pretends to find out the effect of Communicative Language Teaching activities on the levels of anxiety during oral performance, and to find out if there are differences in the levels of anxiety during the oral performance between students who were trained using CLT activities and students who were not. A quasi-experimental design was conducted using two groups of students taking a Conversational English course in a community college in the southern area of Puerto Rico. The Control Group was instructed using the traditional teaching method applied by the teacher while the Experimental Group was instructed using a five weeks lesson plan guide based on Communicative Language Teaching activities. Both groups were composed of 20 students each. A version of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale developed by Horwitz (2010) and adapted by Rodríguez (2010) served as a pre and post-test which was administered before and after the exposition to the treatment. The findings revealed that CLT activities had a positive effect on lowering the levels of anxiety of the Experimental Group. According to these findings, there is significant difference in the levels of anxiety of English language learners who use communicative language activities in a Conversational English course and English language learners who do not use these activities. mariela rivera lópez maestría en educación con especialidad en enseñanza del inglés como segundo idioma mentor: dra. irma n. rodríguez vega anxiety language anxiety clt approach clt activities english language learners