A Survey Study On English Classroom Speaking Anxiety Of Junior High School Students

The “Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard(2017Edition)” pointed out that language skills are an important part of the comprehensive language ability.Among them,the skill of “speaking” has a great influence on middle school students.Cultivating students’ good oral English habits from an early age will greatly help their future studies.However,oral English teaching has always been a weak link in junior high school English teaching.Research has found that in addition to cognitive factors,affective factors also play a significant role in second language acquisition,and in the process of English learning,students’ oral teaching is most prone to anxiety.However,the research samples are mainly concentrated at the university level,and the research on speaking anxiety in primary and secondary schools is quite scarce.In view of this,this study took 126 students in two parallel classes in the second grade of the Hohhot Experimental Middle School and four English teachers in the second grade as the survey subjects.The purpose of this research is to investigate the current situation of students’ speaking anxiety in English classrooms and to in-depth explore its reasons.At the same time,the author also launched a research on the current situation of students’ speaking anxiety from the perspective of gender and self-evaluation variables.This research aims to solve the following three questions:1.What is the overall situation of junior high school students’ speaking anxiety in English classes?2.What is the specific situation of junior high school students’ speaking anxiety in terms of gender and self-evaluation?3.What are the causes for junior high school students’ English speaking anxiety?This research survey was launched in Hohhot Experimental Middle School in October 2020.This research uses questionnaires and interviews as the main research methods,and classroom observations are used as auxiliary tools for the research.After the students completed the questionnaire survey,the author conducted semi-structured interviews with four English teachers and ten students in the second grade.The author uses SPSS 22.0 data analysis software to compare and analyze the collected data.The study found that there is widespread speaking anxiety in English classroom in second grade,and most students are at a moderate level of anxiety.By comparison,the gender differences in the students’ English speaking anxiety are not significant,but the students’ English speaking anxiety level is inversely proportional to the students’ self-evaluation level.The higher the self-evaluation level of the students’ spoken English,the lower their English speaking anxiety level;conversely,the lower the English self-evaluation level,the higher the students’ English speaking anxiety level,and the greater the pressure during oral output.Through the analysis of the cause questionnaire,the causes of English speaking anxiety of junior high school students are mainly divided into three dimensions,students’ psychological factors,students’ verbal expression ability and teachers’ classroom factors.Through analysis,the students’ oral anxiety in English classroom is mainly caused by the students’ own factors.Among them,the students’ English speaking anxiety is mainly caused by their psychological factors,which has a great impact on students’ learning.Classroom factors and students’ speech expression ability also have a certain influence on students’ English speaking anxiety.In view of the above phenomenon,this research provides effective opinions for teachers’ oral teaching.Teachers should pay attention to the students’ spoken English in a timely manner during the teaching process,and use a variety of teaching strategies to help students relieve anxiety and perform better spoken English output.Secondly,teachers should treat boys and girls equally in the teaching process.Students’ oral English self-evaluation has a great influence on their speaking anxiety.Teachers should give feedback to students many times during the teaching process to help students improve their oral English and build up self-confidence.Aiming at the causes of anxiety,this research also puts forward some suggestions to effectively alleviate students’ English speaking anxiety from the perspective of teachers and students.