Abstract

Nowadays the using of the multimedia is extensive and prevailing no matter in technology, education, recreation or communication. For example, increasing movement between countries in Europe, the development of international courses and the new language tests introduced in the curricula of Italian university courses, are making students face a new dimension of learning which involves the knowledge of foreign languages as a basic requirement (Tamburini, 1999). The use of multimedia in teaching is also an innovative method in Taiwan in which teachers utilize media such as audio, video, animation and interactivity to instruct their students, and these materials can give the impetus to previous students who would be attracted and pay attention to the lessons in learning. The multimedia teaching method emphasizes that the interaction between teacher and student is unlike the traditional one-way teaching method. In Taiwan, similar research of language anxiety among different groups has also been conducted. Language anxiety has been discussed from the viewpoints of primary, junior/senior high and college students. However, the researcher found that limited research studies focused on investigating the language anxiety of EFL college students in multimedia environments. These results will suggest that reducing student anxiety and providing a less stressful classroom environment such as multimedia environment might enable English teachers to help students improve both their English performance as well as lower their language anxiety.