A Survey Study Of English Learning Anxiety Of Underachieving Students In Senior High School

In the 1980 s, Affective Filter Hypothesis was put forward by American linguist Stephen D krashen. It indicates that anxiety is one of the main factors affecting language learning. Foreign language learning anxiety means the fear produced when learners communicate by using foreign language, which becomes an important affect factor influencing learners‘ English learning efficiency. And underachieving students as a widespread special group refer to the individuals who are faced with the obvious difficulty in the course of acquiring and applying listening, speaking, reading and writing, and then show unusual behavior. Thus, how to alleviate anxiety of underachieving students in senior high school confuse the masses of teachers and students of senior high school. The thesis is based on the former research achievements discussing overall situation and the causes of English classroom anxiety of the underachievers in senior high school, and the correlation between underachievers in senior high school English learning anxiety and their academic achievement, and then proposing some suggestions on how to reduce underachievers English classroom anxiety in senior high school.62 senior one students were selected from Chahar Right Back Banner High School as subjects, using questionnaire, interview and test as the main instruments. The questionnaire was adapted from Horwitz‘s the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale(FLCAS) applied to investigate the overall current situation and the causes of underachieving students‘ English learning anxiety in senior high school. Interview was the supplementary to questionnaire, which aimed to further explore the causes of their English learning anxiety and asked for suggestions on how to reduce English learning anxiety of underachieving students in senior high school. Test was employed to study the correlation between English learning anxiety and learning achievement. After analyzing the results of the research, the author draws the following conclusions: 1) English learning anxiety is a widespread phenomenon among English underachieving students in senior high school, and more than half of them possess high level of it. By analyzing the result of questionnaire and interview, the author find among all the anxiety, test anxiety gets the highest level, after which the fear of negative evaluation and communicative apprehension follows. 2) There is a significant negative relation between English classroom anxiety and English learning achievement. The result shows that the higher achievement one gets, the lower their fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety and other anxiety scores one acquires. On the contrary, the lower achievement one gets, the higher their fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety and other anxiety scores one acquires. 3) There are five possible factors engendering English learning anxiety of underachieving students in senior high school. They are low self-evaluation, deficiency of tolerance of ambiguity, shortage of comprehensible input, intense classroom atmosphere and incorrect attitude towards test.At last, the author put forward suggestions on how to minimize English learning anxiety of underachieving students in senior high school. They are to help students build confidence, to build the moderate tolerance of ambiguity, to acquire abundant of comprehensible input, to set up a right attitude to exams and to create a relaxing and interesting classroom atmosphere. The software SPSS 19.0 was used to collect and analyze statistics from FLCAS scores and tests.