On Anxiety Problems And Countermeasures Of Junior Middle School Students In English Listening Comprehension

As the attention of foreign language teaching activities gradually shifted from learners’external environment to the study of the internal factors, the status of learner centered has been established in the college English classroom. Therefore, there appear a large number of researches on individual learners’personality difference, cognitive styles, learning motivation, learning strategies at home and abroad. At the same time, the importance of learners’affective factors in learning process and classroom has also attracts researcher and teachers’attention. Is has been recognized that some positive emotions, such as strong learning motivation, positive learning attitude, firm faith and healthy personality will have positive influence on learning, however, other emotions such as anxiety, prohibition, stress even feelings of fear will hinder language input and knowledge construction in the process of learning. So this thesis attempts to study one of the most important learners’affective attitudes:anxiety.Since the1970s, the research on second language acquisition has made a great progress, the emotional factors in language learning started to become the focus of people’s attention. Anxiety is one of the main factors in all of the emotional factors which have great effect on foreign language learning. Generally speaking, when someone cannot overcome threats of obstacles which have made their confidence and pride tumbled or unable to reach their target for long term, the mood of nervous and frighten formed and the sense of failure and guilt increased, this kind of emotion is called anxiety. However, anxiety also exists in language learning. In1986, American psychologists Horwitz and Cope published the article of "Foreign Language Class Anxiety" in Modern English Journal. They first pointed out the concept of foreign language learning anxiety. They defined it as a separate, special and complex psychological phenomenon relevant to classroom language learning and different from other anxiety. They also pointed out that listening is the easiest to arouse learner’s anxiety of all the language skills.Through the literature review, we found that there have been many studies investigating learners’anxiety which focused on college students. Yet researches on anxiety in listening comprehension of junior middle school students need further investigation. So this paper tries to set junior middle school students as the example and discuss the differences and causes of English listening anxiety on gender and grades. What’s more, this study also tries to find some effective ways on reducing Junior middle school students’English listening learning anxiety. The participants selected for this study are97students in Daxing Middle School of Jingzhou, Hubei Province. The research instrument is the modified English Listening Anxiety Scale with the reference of Horwitz’s Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale. All of the data were entered into SPSS11.5for windows. The author applied reliability analysis, descriptive analysis, T-test, One-way Anova and stepwise regression analysis. The results show that junior middle school students have high level of English listening anxiety. There are no significant differences between gender and grades on anxiety while boys seem to have a little higher anxiety than girls and students in Grade Eight suffer the highest anxiety. What’s more, the main reason of causing student’s listening anxiety is listening material anxiety and test anxiety.According to the questionnaire investigation together with literature review, this paper explores the main reasons causing English listening anxiety which include characteristics of listening activity and listening material, tests, environmental and psychological factors. In addition, it puts forward the countermeasures on how to reduce anxiety and improve the quality of English listening teaching which mainly include improving the basic knowledge, mastering the technical about listening comprehension, using diversity way of training, conquering psychological barriers, training students’ listening interest, creating a good environment for listening comprehension and adopting different measures to gender and grades.