Language Anxiety, Personality Tendency And Out-of-Class Autonomous Learning Of English Majors

Learners are centered by modern educational ideas, so autonomy is gaining growing and extensive focus. The concept of autonomy was introduced by Holec in his works of Autonomy and Foreign Language Learning in 1981. Autonomous Learning has been the hot topic of foreign language education, and become its new trend. Terms that can be used to describe autonomous learning are as follows:learner autonomy, autonomous learning, self-instructed learning, independent learning, self-direction and individualized instruction, etc.English majors, as one of the most important and creative sections of English learners, are faced with more and more difficulties and embarrassments with the dissemination of English learning, especially great advances of College English and frequent international exchanges, which are aroused by both educational system and individual factors.Among these common problems existed in English teaching and learning, it is vitally urgent to improve autonomous learning capacities of English majors in out-of-class environment.Affective factors as motivation, attitude, style, believes and learners'self-esteem have always been the center of researches.Among those, language anxiety and personality tendency are another two important factors in affective strategies. Although there are many researches on the correlation between learner autonomy and motivation, attitude, style, researches about whether or not there exist correlations among language anxiety, personality tendency and autonomous learning, how to make fully use of personality tendency and lower or overcome language anxiety in autonomous language learning are relatively rare.Therefore, the thesis aims to explore the correlation among language anxiety, personality tendency and out-of-class autonomous learning, then find effective means to help English majors to lower language anxiety and make full use of personality tendency in out-of-class autonomous learning without or lacking of instructions from language teachers, and then offer reflections and suggestions to English teaching for English majors and their out-of-class language practice.English major freshmen from three newly-established undergraduate colleges after 2000 as Nanyang Institute of Technology, Huanghuai College and Nanyang Normal College have been chosen as the research subjects.In the process of the empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative research methods have been adopted, including 3 revised questionnaires(FLCAS,EPQ and Out-of-class Autonomous Language Learning Questionnaire), TEM-4, term language proficiency tests;interviews, e-mails, QQ chat, reflecting diaries, psychological consultation and observation, and out-of-class learning activities etc. After a research of 17 weeks, the researcher finds that English major freshmen from newly-established undergraduate colleges have comparatively low autonomous language learning capacity and high-level language anxiety; there is only language anxiety that is significantly and negatively correlated with autonomous language learning; The out-of-class language learning activities designed have both improved autonomous learning capacities and academic achievements of English majors from the empirical class.