Adolescents' Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety, Foreign Language Classroom Environment And Their Relationship

As the most prominent emotional disorder in foreign language learning, foreign language anxiety is the focus of foreign language scholars and educators'research. Since Hurwitz, et al. (1986) first separated foreign language classroom anxiety from other forms of anxiety, such as trait and state anxiety, and developed the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS), the study of this field has burned out a fast development.While the FLCAS was developed with college students as subjects, whether it is suitable for young adolescents is unknown. And no studies have conducted upon the examination with subjects of young adolescents. That is one of the goals of this paper tries to solve. Second,to explore the characteristics of young students'foreign language classroom anxiety is also the goal of this study. Besides, only a few researchers have paid attention to classroom environment, which is one of the key factors that influences students'foreign language anxiety, and among the few studies, college English classroom environment, instead of adolescents'classroom environment, was paid attention. So the third goal of this study is to examine the characteristics of young adolescents'foreign language classroom anxiety. The last goal of this paper is to explore the correlation of foreign language classroom anxiety and foreign language classroom environment.First, 709 adolescents from grade 5, grade 6 and grade 7 completed a Chinese version of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) by Horwitz, et al.(1986).The results showed that the revised Chinese version of FLCAS received a high reliability and validity. The structure of foreign language classroom anxiety was found to consist of four factors; they are communicative apprehension, afraid of negative evaluation, intolerable of ambiguity, and lack of confidence.Some characters of adolescent's foreign language classroom anxiety were shown. Significant main effects were found in foreign language classroom anxiety and its four factors. The interactions between perceived English level, and grades in the dimension of communicative apprehension and afraid of negative evaluation, between perceived English level and the dimension of lack of confidence, between perceived English level and parents'expects in the dimensions of communicative apprehension and lack of confidence were also found significant.Some characters of young students'foreign language classroom anxiety were also found. There were significant main effects of grades in all dimensions of classroom environments except the dimension of classmates'relation, of perceived foreign language level in classmates'relation. Several significant interactions were shown among gender, grades, perceived foreign language level and parents'expects.Finally, a correlation analysis, a multiple regression analysis and a path analysis were conducted between classroom environment and foreign language classroom anxiety to explore the correlation of classroom environment to foreign language classroom anxiety. Negative significant correlations existed between the relation among classmates, the relation between students and teachers, the discipline in foreign language class, and foreign language classroom anxiety. A positive correlation existed between school work burden and foreign language classroom anxiety. Three environmental factors as the relation among classmates, the discipline in foreign language class and school work burden, were found significant to predict foreign language classroom anxiety(p<0.001),the R2 for the regression was 0.144,indicating that these environmental factors explained 14.4% of the variance of the classroom anxiety scores. 15 significant path routes were found how environmental factors affect foreign language classroom anxiety directly and indirectly.