Research On The Influence Of Self-efficacy On Vocational College Students' Listening Comprehension Anxiety

Research on foreign language anxiety begun since the 1980s, as E. Horwitz and John Cope (1986) points out that anxiety is the most obviously psychological phenomenon in listening and speaking process, and listening obstacle caused by anxiety is worth studying. Among those studies on Foreign Language Listening Comprehension Anxiety (hereafter as FLLCA), most researchers focused their countermeasure on making change on extrinsic factors and had made great progress. Despite the progress, few of them concern with students'personal, subjective and intrinsic factors, such as self-efficacy. Self-efficacy beliefs are defined as "people's judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances," (Bandura,1986). According to Bandura, students'self-efficacy and their confidence definitely associated with their study achievement. The theory enlightens the connection in mind that would the students in higher vocational college who are less confident have lower self-efficacy, suffer more study anxiety and make relatively slow progress on study. Therefore the study was designed to examine the levels of students'FLLCA in higher vocational college, their self-efficacy and the two-two relationships between English listening anxiety, listening self-efficacy and their level of listening comprehension.One hundred and fifty-four students in Fuzhou Vocational and Technical College were investigated in Experiment One to discover their level of FLLCA and self-efficacy with the measures of Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS) and Self-efficacy Questionnaire. Through the analysis of the data collected, it is found out that students experienced certain level of FLLCA and their self-efficacy score is lower than standard level. It is also found out that there is a negative relationship between students'level of anxiety and their self-efficacy, which means high listening anxiety students have low self-efficacy score. The result confirms that the possibility to decrease students'listening anxiety is to enhance their self-efficacy. On the basis of the analysis, the researcher made a teaching experiment with fifty-two of those subjects taken part in Experiment One. The result of the FLLAS and Self-efficacy Questionnaire about the fifty-two subjects in previous experiment presented the background information, their level of FLLCA and self-efficacy in pre-test stage. At the pre-stage, an exam was given to them to assess their level of listening comprehension which can be utilized to compare with that of post-test. During the process, some measures were adopted to enhance students'self-efficacy, such as encouraging students to set appropriate goal of their foreign language listening, providing students with more success opportunities, guiding students to forget failure, pumping up their self-esteem, and inspiring students to master good listening strategies. At the post-stage, questionnaires used in Experiment one and another listening test were administered to participants. The result of the data collected at post-stage shows that the enhancement of self-efficacy can decrease students' level of listening anxiety and improve their listening comprehension level by some extent.The research displays some pedagogical implications, limitations and suggestions for future study.