Anxiety And EFL Listening Comprehension

Recently, affective factors have attracted more and more attention from researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and second language teaching. Among all the affective factors, anxiety from language learners has become the study focus of both Chinese and Western scholars in the field of SLA over the past two or three decades. Noticeably, recent studies mainly focused on foreign language learning as a whole and only a few concentrate on the possible effects of anxiety on the learning of a certain language skill such as writing, listening, or speaking. As it is known, language learning consists of not only reading and writing, but also listening, speaking and other related skills. Besides, it is often noted that language learners tend to suffer from a certain degree of anxiety in the process of language skill acquiring and some students prove to be more sensitive to a specific skill while learning a foreign language. Among all the skills required for learning a foreign language, listeningproves to have its own unique features. Based on these features, it is necessary to conduct researches into the relationship between foreign language listening anxiety and listening proficiency.This thesis, first and foremost, aims to address the following research questions.1. Do Chinese students report experiencing foreign language anxiety and foreign language listening anxiety?2. Is there a positive correlation between foreign language anxiety and listening anxiety? That is, do students with higher foreign language anxiety have higher listening anxiety?3. What is the relationship between students' listening proficiency and foreign language listening anxiety?4. Do students' levels of anxiety differ significantly according to their gender? To resolve the above four questions, the author analyzes the collected data by adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods. First, to conduct the survey, the author will adopt the English Listening Anxiety Scale (ELAS) revised on the basis of the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS) proposed by Kim. Then based on the ELAS an SPSS analysis will be carried out about the correlation between relevant factors. Based on the result of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn:Firstly, Chinese students suffer from anxiety in both English language learning and English listening, which proves that there is a positive correlation between foreign language anxiety (FLA) and foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA). Secondly, there exists a negative correlation between listening anxiety and listening proficiency in the students being studied. Finally, there is no correlation between listening anxiety and gender of students.To conclude, foreign language listening anxiety does widely exist in foreign language learning, which requires teachers to take effective coping strategies to reduce students' anxiety in listening classes, so as to improve their listening proficiency.