Research On English Classroom Anxiety Of Non-English Majors In Dalian Maritime University

Since the 1980s, second (foreign) language acquisition has gradually aroused people's interests and great progress has been witnessed in this field. Much research has similar opinions on the relationship between affective variables and foreign language learning. Anxiety is considered as one of the most crucial affective variables, and language anxiety is a complicated mental phenomenon specific to language learning.This thesis investigates the impact of students' classroom anxiety on their English achievement. An adapted Foreign Language Anxiety Scale was used to measure the anxiety levels of 86 non-English major students of Dalian Maritime University, to investigate the relationship between their classroom anxieties and their English achievement, and to analyze the characteristics of the distribution of anxiety scores in every respect of their English learning. In view of Chinese culture and the characteristics of Chinese language learning, the causes for the anxieties and the influence of the anxieties are analyzed, and some teaching strategies are proposed based on the above analysis.The result indicates that the anxiety score of most students are significantly high and there is a statistically significant positive correlation between students' classroom anxiety and their English achievement, that is, the higher the anxiety is, the worse their grades are. The statistical analysis shows that anxiety score is significantly negatively related with spoken English, dictation, listening comprehension, and slightly negatively related with reading comprehension, writing, but not related with vocabulary-grammar, cloze test. The statistical analysis also reveals that the distribution of the students' of Dalian Maritime University anxieties focuses on two aspects: the fear of negative evaluation and communication apprehension. Affected by classroom anxiety, communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative apprehension, students' achievement on spoken English test differs greatly. This indicates that foreign language classroom anxiety is an important factor influencing L2 acquisition. The causes for anxiety can be attributed to the great influence of Chinese cultural background, the characteristics of Chinese language learning and individual differences such as sex, family background. It is suggested that it is necessary and feasible to decrease the students' anxiety in classroom English teaching if cultural background and individual differences are paid attention to, if the decrease of students' anxiety is treated as one of the teaching targets, and if a lively classroom atmosphere is created with students' self-confidence built.Anxiety is possibly the most pervasive obstruction in English learning. The findings as well as the discussion of the present study pave the way for more in-depth study on anxiety and its more subtle effects upon English learners.