Introduction With the rapid growth in international communication, English is becoming more and more important. The urgent task for English teachers, is to apply knowledge gained from educational psychology research to make teaching more efficient. For this purpose, anxiety, an important psychological phenomenon in foreign language learning, is discussed in this article. First anxiety will be defined to build up a clear concept of its origin and its nature. Then its effect on foreign language learning will be analysed. A few suggestions for teachers will be presented at the end.