| The research on second/foreign language acquisition/learning has been transferred from "how to teach" to '' how to learn'' since 1970's. Learners are in an important position in modern language teaching theory. Humanistic teaching concept has been given more and more attention to promote the development of whole person. Language teaching theorists begin to attach importance to the research on individual language learners. Affect and learning strategies are two important components in this field. Humanistic educators represented by Rogers laid more emphasis on affect in teaching. They argued that learning should include cognition and affect and put forward the concept of whole person composed of intelligence and affect, which emphasized the importance of individual liking in learning (Rogers1969, quoted from Lu Jia-mei 2002: 21). In language teaching, affect will be broadly considered as aspects of emotion, feeling, mood or attitude which condition behavior (Arnold & Brown 1999, quoted from Arnold 1999: 1). Anxiety is an important affective variable. The study on anxiety began with Brown's study in 1973 (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991c: 86). Anxiety falls into trait anxiety, state anxiety, and situation specific anxiety. Many researchers have adopted the situation specific approach as an alternative to using either state or trait anxiety measures (MacIntyre & Gardner 1991c: 92). Although the research on foreign language anxiety began in 1970's, it was not definitely defined until in 1980's. Foreign language anxiety is defined as a distinct complex of self-perception, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process (Horwitz et al 1986: 128). Foreign language anxiety comprises communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation (Horwitz et al, 1986:127). Based on the students' self-report and a series of related measurements, Horwitz et al (1986) devised a 33-item scale—Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS). The scale, including the above three components, is a major instrument in measuring foreign language anxiety. It has played an important role in the research on language anxiety. By means of qualitative and quantitative approaches, researchers abroad have made considerable empirical research on the role, the sources, the reduction strategies, and the relationship between anxiety and language learning performance, which turns out to be fruitful contribution to this field. Researchers at home mainly focus on anxiety of language performance: reading anxiety, listening anxiety, writing anxiety and speaking anxiety. The area of learner strategy research has grown dramatically in importance over the last twenty years or so (Skehan 1998: 263). Therefore, the importance of choosing and using learning strategies in second/foreign language acquisition/learning can't be ignored. The study on strategies began in the early 1970's. The preliminary research aimed at searching for the characteristics of good language learners. In 1980's, the focus began to switch to the relationship between learning strategies and the process of learning and the cognitive process of information processing (Jiang Zu-kang 1994: 51). Researchers abroad mainly center on such aspects as definitions, classifications, the factors influencing strategy use (concerning learners and environment), strategy training, and the effects of the choice of strategies on language learning. The research at home covers the choice of strategies (e.g., strategies of vocabulary learning and reading), strategy training and learner factors conditioning strategies, which lays an important basis for the Chinese to learn a foreign language.The present study was based on cognitive psychology (Tobias's three-stage learning model of input, processing and output) and the affect-related theory (Krashen's affective filter hypothesis) in second language acquisition. Horwitz et al 's (1986) construct of foreign language anxiety and Oxford's (...
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