An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Junior High School Students’ English Listening Anxiety And Listening Proficiency

Horwitz and Cope(1986)believe that listening anxiety(LA)can be considered as one of the most commonly negative emotions experienced by foreign language learners.Domestic scholars have attached great importance to LA in English learning and done a lot of related researches.However,the number of researches on the correlation between listening anxiety(LA)and listening proficiency(LP)of junior high school students’ is not sufficient.Based on Maslow’s humanistic psychology and Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis,the current study attempts to solve the following three questions by combining quantitative and qualitative research:(1)What is the whole situation of LA of junior high school students?(2)What is the correlation between LA and LP of junior high school students?(3)What are the main causes of LA of junior high school students?103 Grade 9 students from Zhangdian Junior High School participated in the experiment.In the quantitative study,an English listening anxiety scale(ELAS)was employed to measure the degree of the participants’ LA and an English listening proficiency test was used to test their LP.The data were input into the computer and analyzed by SPSS 20.0.In the qualitative study,an open-ended question was designed to probe into the subjects’ causes of LA.The major findings were as follows:(1)Junior high school students indeed experienced different degrees of LA.(2)There was a significant negative correlation between junior high school students’ LA and their LP.(3)There were three main causes of junior high school students’ LA:low confidence;poor adaptability to different recordings;short poor attention span.The main pedagogical implications are as follows:(1)Due to the existence of LA in the listening comprehension process,students need to be at ease with different levels of LA and English teachers should guide students to face LA correctly in their English listening process.(2)English teachers should try their best to help students reduce their LA.(3)English teachers should stress the training of students’ listening strategies and skills in listening comprehension class.Limitations of the study and suggestions for future researches are as follows:(1)The number of subjects was relatively small,and the result of it might not be representative,so the subjects of future researches should include more students to make the research results more convincing and reliable.(2)The questionnaire of ELAS(English listening anxiety scale)adapted from the Kim’s FLLAS(Foreign language listening anxiety scale)by the researcher and her colleagues was not fully scientific,so it needs to be further polished and refined in order to improve its reliability.(3)The current research only focused on the correlation between LA and LP.Future researches can explore the correlation between language anxiety and language proficiency of reading,speaking and writing respectively.