An Investigation Study On Foreign Language Listening Anxieties And Strategies Of High School Students In Linxia Minority District

This paper is to study the present situation of language anxiety and the characteristics of listening strategy and the influence of effective listening strategies on listening anxiety of high-school students in Linxia minority district. Simultaneously, this study will also clarify which listening strategies can reduce the listening anxiety so that the result of the study can help the high-school students in Linxia minority district to improve their listening and the teachers there to modify their listening teaching. Finally the study may provide valuable data for the further future research.This paper is designed to settle following questions:1. What are the distributions and characteristics of listening anxiety of the high-school students in Linxia minority district?2. Do the listening strategies influence the listening anxiety?3. What are the characteristics of listening strategies of the high-school students in Linxia minority district? Which kind of strategies can reduce their listening anxiety?The study mainly adopts the quantitative and qualitative methods. In this study, the participants consist of 328 high school-students from Jish high middle school in Jishishan Minority Autonomous County of Baoan, Dongxiang and Sala Peoples in Linxia minority district. The quantitative materials are two questionnaires: the Chinese version of Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale by Kim(2000) and the Questionnaire of English Listening Learning Strategies by Xu Haibo(2005). All the data collected is dealt with cause analysis to find out the items related to listening anxiety as well as listening strategies by SPSS20.0. Then, each category of both listening anxiety and listening strategies is processed by descriptive analysis and correlation analysis to get an overview of the two variables.Qualitative research method is mainly interview and its process is recorded in Chinese and transcribed into text and then classified finally.The findings from this investigation study are as follows:1. Most high-school students in Linxia minority district face high anxiety in listening. The participants of medium anxiety make up 28.96%, the participants of high anxiety make up45.12%, but low anxiety group only accounts for 25.92%.2. The rank of students’ listening strategies in declining order was cognitive strategy,metacognitive strategy and socio-affective strategy.3. The using difference of the listening strategies has effects on the listening anxiety. The rank of its influence in declining order was metacognitive strategy, cognitive strategy and socio-affective strategy.The results of the study have key significance on guiding students to reduce their listening anxiety to improve their foreign language listening and teachers to modify their teaching.1. Teachers are suggested to face the listening anxiety bravely and to find out the causes of listening anxiety for students, especially for those of high anxiety;2. Teachers are suggested to teach students the effective strategies which can reduce the listening anxiety as well as the basic language knowledge.3. The students are suggested to develop a suitable language learning strategy system to reduce students’ listening anxiety and improve their foreign language study.