Language Anxiety and Classroom Humor

According to Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, anxiety contributes to an affective filter, which prevents students from receiving input, while low anxiety appears to be conducive. Language anxiety may not be alleviated simply through learning strategies. Joint efforts from both the teacher and students are desirable. My study investigates and compares the levels of anxiety experienced by non-English majors in regular English classrooms. The main objective is to measure how gender, personality and proficiency in English affect the level of anxiety. The results are only tentative and need to be verified by future researches. But they do remind us that teachers should create a harmonious and supportive instructional environment for the students so that they may feel relaxed and confident and may concentrate on learning. Classroom humor is proposed as an effective teaching method for language teachers to employ so as to reduce students' anxiety level. In addition to a literature review of previous studies on humor, I included several practical and applicable methods. Some suggestions are put forward concerning how to make effective humor delivery.