A Study On English Test Anxiety Of Junior Two Students

English, as a foreign language, is a major subject as well as Chinese and Mathin middle schools. Therefore, students tend to experience anxiety in English testingsettings. With the implement of the National English Curriculum, affective factors inEnglish teaching are stressed. Among them, anxiety is considered as a major one thatinfluences English learning. In the previous researches on the topic, most focus on testanxiety, only a part of them pay attention to English test anxiety. However, it is rarethat junior two students are regarded as the only subjects.Based on the present situation, the author makes the research with the questionsbelow: Do junior two students experience English test anxiety? If they do, what’s thedegree? What’s the correlation between English test anxiety and English testperformance? And what are the causes of their English test anxiety?51junior two students from the middle school, Chengdu Experimental ForeignLanguage Middle School (Western Campus) are involved in the study, and the validquestionnaires are50. In order to design a relatively scientific study, the author didnot only use questionnaires but also interview questions. A modified Chinese versionof Sarason’s Test Anxiety Scale and Zheng’s questionnaire are used to identify juniortwo students’ English test anxiety and explore the causes of English test anxiety. The50students’ mid-term English test scores are used to investigate the influence ofEnglish test anxiety on the performance. Besides, all the data is collected and analyzed by EXCEL and SPSS19.0According to the study result,50junior two students in the middle schoolexperience moderate English test anxiety, which mainly comes from the fear of future,especially that of the low scores in the coming senior high entrance examination. AndEnglish test anxiety exerts a negative effect on test performance with a curvilinearcorrelation, which means students with moderate English test anxiety tend tooutperform their peers those who belong to high or low English test anxiety group.The study is applicable to English teaching. It could help teachers to guidejunior two students to reduce their fear of future after identifying junior two students’English test anxiety and the causes, and also help students adjust themselves to abetter preparation for entrance examination for senior high school, what’s moreimportant is that reducing English test anxiety benefit their English learning..