English Vocabulary Learning Anxiety Among Non-english Major Students

Ever since the 1970 s, foreign language studies have shifted their focus from “how to teach” into “how to learn”. Foreign language learners’ affective factors have become a heated discussion for experts at home and abroad. A high level of anxiety will impend foreign language learning. Large numbers of scholars have made numerous researches about anxiety level in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar. However, studies on English vocabulary researches still need more concern. As is well known, vocabulary proficiency plays an essential role in foreign language learning. Especially for non-English major students, they don’t employ vocabulary learning strategies skillfully, which triggers high levels of vocabulary anxiety.This paper is based on the theory of Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis and Horwitz et al.’s foreign language learning anxiety theory framework, trying to study the situation of non-English major students’ anxiety in learning English vocabulary. It has explored the current distribution of vocabulary anxiety among non-English majors, different individual variable of vocabulary anxiety, and the correlation between students’ vocabulary anxiety and the proficiency of English vocabulary. The author made a random sample investigation of non-English major students through questionnaire and vocabulary tests, The 120 sampling is acquired by the author randomly from 2 universities of Sichuan through questionnaire and vocabulary tests and the data are processed by spss19.0 to make the descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, one way analysis of variance and Pearson related coefficient analysis. The investigation includes College English vocabulary learning anxiety scale(CEVLAS), which is self designed with a reference to Horwitz et al.’s English classroom anxiety scale, Nation’s vocabulary level test and Read’s words association testThis research indicates that the non-English major students do experience English vocabulary anxiety. Secondly, female students’ vocabulary anxiety level is far higher than male’s significantly. Thirdly, students in different grade and majors have not a significant difference in vocabulary anxiety. Fourthly, students from general high school are obviously more anxious than key high school, but the level of university has little influence on it. Besides, students from rural areas are more anxious than urban areas’ students but parents’ education background has little influence on students’ vocabulary anxiety. Besides, students’ intelligence level is correlated with vocabulary anxiety level and introverted students are more anxious than extroverted students significantly. Finally, the consequences of the quantitative research display significantly a negative correlation between students’ English vocabulary competence and vocabulary anxiety. A quantitative research method is adopted to make an in-depth analysis on non-English major college students’ English vocabulary learning anxiety from the multiple perspectives, aiming to provide more pertinent and target suggestions on foreign language vocabulary teaching.