A Study On The Correlation Between Listening Comprehension Anxiety And Listening Strategies Of Junior High School Students In Urumqi

In recent years, affective factors in language learning have attracted theattention of more and more researchers（Brown,1994；Horwitz&Cope,2001）.Anxiety, as one of the most important affective factors, is frequently discussed. Thecorrelations between anxiety, strategies and learning outcome embodies in themodels proposed by Ellis(1994) and MacIntyre(1994) serve as the conceptualframeworks of the present investigation. The fundamental purpose of this thesis is toexplore the correlations between listening comprehension anxiety and listeningstrategies in junior high schools in Urumqi, the following questions are to beanswered in this research:1) What is the state of English listening comprehensionanxiety among the students in junior high schools in Urumqi, and what is thesituation of the utilization of English listening strategies?2) What is the relationshipof listening comprehension anxiety and listening strategies among the students? Doesthis relationship vary in different grades?3) Are there any differences in theemploying of listening strategies between the low-anxiety group and the high one? Ifthere are, what are they?The subjects are180junior high school students from Urumqi No.12MiddleSchool. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlational analysis, one-way ANOVA andt-test are employed in the study. Three questionnaires，Background InformationQuestionnaire, English Listening Anxiety Scale and English Listening Strategy Scaleare administered to investigate the background information about the subjectslearning, the state of listening anxiety and the application of listening strategiesamong the subjects.The results of the study reveal that listening anxiety experienced by the junior highschool students is pervasive and has become a universal problem. Meta-cognitivestrategy is employed at a comparatively high frequency level, while cognitivestrategy and social/affective strategy is employed at a comparatively low frequencylevel. Listening anxiety has a marked but negative correlation to the application oflistening strategies（correlation coefficient：0.635）, especially to the cognitivestrategy（correlation coefficient：0.678）. The significant difference exists in theapplications of cognitive strategy（sig=0.012<0.05） and social/affective strategy（sig=0.013<0.05） between high anxiety group and low one, but can not be foundin the applications of meta-cognitive strategy（sig=0.082>0.05）. Listening anxietyhas a negative correlation to the application of listening strategies both in grade one and three students in junior high school（correlation coefficient are-.604**和-.723**）, and compared with grade three students, grade one has a higher correlationcoefficient.Furthermore, the results of the present study are discussed and correspondingpedagogical implications are proposed to facilitate teaching with regard to juniorhigh school students. The significance of the present study lies in providing morepractical evidence for the related theory in this field.