A Study Of Non-English Majors' Language Anxiety

Anxiety has been a long-discussed topic in psychology. However, anxiety studied in psychology is not exactly the same as anxiety in language learning. Language anxiety, confined to the second language learning area, is the main concern of this thesis. There are both facilitating and debilitating aspects of language anxiety. Most researchers state that language anxiety is an affective filter, which hinders the achievement of language learners. Anxiety can be studied from three perspectives—trait anxiety, state anxiety and situation specific anxiety. As far as language anxiety is concerned, it can be best studied from the situation specific perspective. Horwitz et al.(1986) advanced FLCAS—Foreign Language Anxiety Scale to study language anxiety from the situation specific perspective. Horwitz et al.(1986) identified 33 items of FLCAS into three factors and Aida (1994) regrouped these items into four factors.Based on these theories, this thesis sets out to conduct a research on 125 second year non-English majors in Tongji University. These students are grouped into four classes and given a questionnaire, consisting of FLCAS and the part II (Appendix I) , on the eleventh week of the first semester. The data of the questionnaire is collected and analyzed in Chapter II. From the analysis, we can find that more similarities exist between Aida (1994)'s data and that of the writer. Therefore, Aida (1994)'s regrouped factor division is adopted to further analyze the data. From the analysis, we can find that Factor I and Factor II are the most prominent factors contributing to students'language anxiety. As to gender, no great difference in anxiety is found.In Chapter III, a six-week experiment is carried out with two hypotheses. Hypothesis I : Subjects'anxiety can be relieved with the implementation of certain methods. Hypothesis II : The smaller the class is, the lower the anxiety will be. All these 125 subjects are divided into two groups, each consisting of two classes, with Group 1 as the control classes and Group 2 as the experimental classes. For Group 2, one class has 35 subjects and the other has as few as 18 subjects, which provides the writer a chance to testify Hypothesis II.In Chapter IV, the post-experiment data is collected and analyzed. Hypothesis I is proved : 1) great differences of anxiety level exist between the experimental classes and...