A Study On The Correlation Between Grade Nine Students’ Teacher-caused Anxiety And Their English Achievements In English Class

With a rapid development of humanistic psychology,learners’ emotional factors have aroused the attention of educators and linguists.Anxiety as an important emotional factor has gradually become a hot topic in foreign language teaching research at home and abroad.Meanwhile,according to the New Standard English Curriculum,emotions of the students should be highly emphasized in English teaching.However,there are various sources of students’ language learning anxiety.Among them,the classroom behaviors and qualities of the language teacher have been regarded as the factors that can not be ignored.The present study analyzes the overall situation of Grade Nine students’ teacher-caused anxiety and the differences among overachievers,average achievers and underachievers in teacher-caused anxiety.It aims to help the teachers to have a better knowledge of teacher-caused anxiety and try to provide suggestions to alleviate students’ negative anxiety in English learning.In this study,questionnaire survey,semi-structured interview and class observation were adopted as the research methods.In the questionnaire survey,seven dimensions of teacher-caused anxiety are discussed.They are anxiety caused by teachers’ questioning,anxiety caused by teachers’ language,anxiety caused by teachers’ classroom activities,anxiety caused by teachers’ bad mood,anxiety caused by teachers’ error correction,anxiety caused by teachers’ evaluation and anxiety caused by teachers’ professional quality.The questionnaire survey was conducted on two hundred students in Grade Nine from one junior high school.The data were analyzed by SPSS software such as descriptive analysis,one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation analysis in order to answer the following questions:(1)What is the overall situation of Grade Nine students’ teacher-caused anxiety in English class?(2)Are there any differences in teacher-caused anxiety among overachievers,average achievers and underachievers?(3)What is the correlation between Grade Nine students’ teacher-caused anxiety and their English learning achievements? At the same time,the study also combined the semi-structured interview and the class observation to get a further understanding about the participants in teacher-caused anxiety.The results indicate that most of the students experience a low or moderate level of teacher-caused anxiety in English class.Among overachievers,average achievers and underachievers,underachievers suffer the highest level of anxiety.Excessive degree of anxiety has a negative impact on English learning.English achievements decline with the increase of anxiety.So the impact of English classroom anxiety on students’ achievements can not be ignored,and more efforts should be made to make anxiety in the proper degree to facilitate students’ English learning.There exists a strong negative correlation between students’ teacher-caused anxiety and their English achievements.Based on the findings,both English teachers and students can get some implications.Teacher’s appropriate classroom error correction,feedback,classroom activities,good interaction in classroom teaching and students’ correct cognition and attribution can help to alleviate their teacher-caused anxiety in English learning.