A Study On Foreign Language Learning Anxiety

As a language teacher, I often hear students complaining that sometimes they would experience uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, tension or fear. Certain language tasks like duty report or role play make them feel dreadful and speaking in English in front of the rest of the students sometimes makes the most confident student feel nervous and even stammer on stage. These feelings all belong to foreign language anxiety. What has caused it and what are the useful strategies to employ to cope with it are my primary concern in this dissertation.The present dissertation is an attempt to find out the level of foreign language anxiety among Chinese senior high school students, because although there have been plenty researches done in this area, findings are not so consistent and research about my subject group has been limited. This is also one of the reasons why I chose this title as my research area.This dissertation made an attempt to answer three questions: What is the level of foreign language anxiety among Chinese high school students? What factors are related to the prediction of foreign language anxiety and finally, what effective strategies can language teachers and learners use to reduce the negative effect of language anxiety? Questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation are deployed to collect data and the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods helps enormously in better interpretation of all the data from this study.Our task as foreign and second language teachers is to create an atmosphere in our classes for effective language learning and an attitude in our learners that reflect interest and motivation to learn the language (Young, 1991). By reducing foreign language anxiety, we are trying to create a best suitable situation for our language learners on their road to foreign language learning. In this paper, the first part would include an introduction (chapter I), and a literature and research review (chapter II), where I shall examine some classic literature and the previous researches that have been done in this area. In the second part of this dissertation, I would discuss the context (chapter III), the research methodology (chapter IV), and the data analysis (chapter V) of my research. And the last part would be the conclusion and the future research (chapter VI)...