A Study On Language Anxiety In English Learning Of Senior Middle School Students In Grade Three

In recent years, a remarkable shift takes place in foreign language teaching andlearning. The teaching focus has transited from the teachers to the students. Affectivefactors of the learners are highly emphasized in classroom language teaching. Accordingto the New Standard English Curriculum, English teaching should be geared to thedevelopment of all the students for quality education and affections of each studentshould be concerned in classroom language teaching. Anxiety as one of the mostimportant affective factors has aroused the concern of many scholars. Krashen points outa high level of anxiety contributes to the rising of the affective filter which will impedethe language acquisition. And humanism advocates the student-centered education with apurpose to promote the all around development of the students.Basing on the affective filter hypothesis and the humanistic theories, the study aimsto answer the following four questions.(1) To what degree do students in grade three insenior middle school experience language anxiety in English learning?(2) Are there anydifferences in English learning anxiety between male and female students, studentsmajoring in liberal art and science, students from rural and urban areas, students from keyschool and common school?(3) What’s the relationship between language anxiety andEnglish learning achievement?(4) What are the possible sources of anxiety and the waysto alleviate anxiety in English learning?Questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview were adopted as the studyingmethods. As to the questionnaire survey, the foreign language classroom anxiety scaledesigned by Horwitz was employed in the study. Four hundred students in grade threefrom two senior middle schools participated in the survey. As to the data collected in thequestionnaire, descriptive analysis, independent sample test, one way anova and pearsoncorrelation analysis were conducted by statistic package for social science(SPSS) version20.0. The semi-structured interview served as a supplementary for the questionnaireinvestigation to get a further understanding about the participants. Sixteen students wereselected as the interviewee and content analysis was carried out aiming to find out the sources of anxiety and ways to reduce anxiety.The results indicate that the majority of the students experience a low level ofanxiety or moderate level of anxiety. Male students are more anxious than female studentsand students from the rural areas experience higher anxiety than those coming from urbanareas. No significant differences are found between students with different majors orschools. There’s a mild negative correlation between English learning anxiety and Englishlearning achievement. The main sources of anxiety include the personality of the students,learning attitude and effort in English learning, content of the learning material, testings,classroom activities and the influence of the teachers. Six suggestions are put forward toalleviate anxiety, namely giving more encouragement to the students, changing beliefstowards English learning and enhancing language study, providing comprehensible input,reducing test anxiety, organizing classroom activities properly and making goodinteraction between the teachers and the students.