Listening Anxiety And Strategy Use Of College Non-English Major Students

From the 1970s, great progress has been made in the field of second language acquisition. Many researchers have paid much attention to learners' affective variables. As one of the most important affective variables, foreign language anxiety is a kind of complicated mental phenomenon specific to language learning. Through literature review, the researcher finds that most studies have focused on general foreign language anxiety, neglecting the dimensions of language-skill specific anxieties. The present study attempted to investigate the EFL listening anxiety among non-English majors by utilizing both the quantitative and qualitative research methods. The quantitative parts of the study mainly studied EFL listening anxiety and the relationship between EFL listening anxiety and listening strategy use, while the qualitative study further explored the sources of EFL listening anxiety.The participants selected for this study were 122 non-English major sophomores of Weifang Medical University, with 66 male students and 56 female students. The instruments included three questionnaires:the Background Information Questionnaire (BIQ), the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS) and the Listening Strategies Scale (LSS), and interview with 12 students. All the data were entered into SPSS 17.0 for Windows. To do reliability analysis, Cronbach's alpha was adopted. The researcher also applied descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis and independent samples t-test analysis.The results show that non-English major college students do experience foreign language listening anxiety and that students' listening anxiety level has a significant negative correlation with their use of listening strategies. As for listening strategies, students tend to use cognitive strategies most frequently, and metacognitive strategies just follow cognitive strategies, while they seldom use socio-affective strategies. There are significant gender differences in terms of listening anxiety level. Based on the statistical analysis of the questionnaires and the feedback from the interview, the study explores the potential sources of English listening anxiety, which include characteristics of listening activity, characteristics of listening materials, characteristics of listening tasks and learner and instructor beliefs.The findings of the present study will make certain contributions to the foreign language listening anxiety research, and the practical instructions of listening teaching and learning. English teachers should consider that non-English majors do experience listening anxiety, which requires them to teach explicit listening strategies to help students to decrease anxiety and listen more effectively.