A Study Of Factors Affecting Senior High School Students’ Anxiety In English Speaking

Feelings of anxiety, apprehension and nervousness are common among English learners while speaking English. These feelings are considered to have a potentially negative effect on communication. It is of great importance for teachers to recognize that anxiety is a common problem for students in speaking English and to help them overcome their feelings of anxiety.All the students and English teachers in Senior Two from Soochow University High School participated in the research. The research combines a quantitative study and a qualitative study, trying to find out to which degree students feel anxious when speaking English. The research has tried to explore the factors that language anxiety can possibly stem from and a variety of suggestions to deal with it.The results show that it is a very common phenomenon for high school students to feel anxious in speaking English.Moreover, two major factors contribute to students’ high anxiety level, including factors from students themselves and factors from other aspects like the traditional way of teaching etc. For students themselves, those with introvert characters tend to be more anxious in speaking English. An equally important factor that deserves our attention is self-cognition. Students with low self-evaluation tend to be less confident. The research has found that many EFL learners are afraid of making mistakes and they care about other’s evaluation because a positive self- image is important.All the subjects complain about a rigid and formal classroom environment. It is found that feelings of anxiety become threatening when the teachers’ ways of error correction are inappropriate. Linguistic factors may cause anxiety for high school students. In C hina, parents’ high educational expectations also cause great pressure for students. In addition, cultural differences between China and western countries sometimes make the students apprehensive when communicating with native-speakers even if they have a good command of the language.Some teaching suggestions have also been put forward. For example, teachers should try to build a harmonious classroom environment. Making the classes lively and interesting is of almost equal importance. Lexical chucks cannot be overlooked. For students, they are supposed to have positive attitudes towards learning English. For parents, they should not have very high expectations of their children. Furthermore, because of the important role of teachers, it is necessary to make English teachers aware of this phenomenon.