An Empirical Study On English Listening Anxiety Of Civil Aviation Student Pilots

With the rapid development of civil aviation industry in China, the student pilots group of civil aviation industry is constantly expanding in recent years. Moreover, because of the development of the international aviation, English competence has become an important indicator to measure the overall quality of the civil aviation pilots. As the special civil aviation students and the future pilots who recruited by Chinese airlines, those student pilots should know that the importance of English listening learning is self-evident. Some previous studies show that English listening anxiety is an important affective disorder during the process of English listening for college students. However, there is relatively few English anxiety research that specifically aimed at the special group of civil aviation student pilots.This paper adopted " Background information questionnaire "," English listening anxiety scale " and " English listening learning strategies scale " to do a series of contrastive analyses on the English listening anxiety status and the English listening strategies use status between the flight technique major students group and the general major college students group. According to the results data of the self-introduction questionnaires, this paper contrastively discussed the relationships among the English listening anxiety status, the English listening strategies use status and the English listening comprehension scores of CET-4on both group students. Then, the author picked up8students from both groups to have a face-to-face interview, and comprehensively analyzed the performances and causes of English listening anxiety by illustrating the similarities and differences between the civil aviation college student pilots group and the general major students group.The students who accept the investigation of self-introduction questionnaires are62college student pilots who are chosen at random from the flight technique major from Civil Aviation Flight University of China (CAFUC) and76general major college students who are also chosen at random from the same university. All the students of the flight technique major group and the general major group come from the same university and even at the same grade, and the number of students of the both groups remains nearly at the same level. This study adopts the statistical package for social science SPSS15.0to do the questionnaires data analyses by using the reliability and validity test, T test, correlation analysis, descriptive analysis, and regression analysis methods.The study has already yielded several findings:86.6%of those civil aviation college student pilots have moderate or high English listening anxiety. For both group students, there is a significant negative correlation between the English listening anxiety and the use status of English listening strategies. For both group students, the English listening capability is positively correlated with the use status of English listening learning strategies and the English listening metacognitive strategies can most effect the English listening comprehension scores’improvement or reduction. Compared with the causes of English listening anxiety of the general major college students group, the English listening anxiety causes for the flight technique major group is more complicated, and two most important reasons which may arouse English listening anxiety are the pressure of ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) English level test and English radiotelephony communication.