An Empirical Study On Reducing Students' Anxiety In Listening Comprehension Through Listening Supports

As a basic language skill, listening comprehension plays an essential role in daily communication and in foreign language learning. Obviously, it is important for teachers to work for the improvement of students' listening comprehension ability in China. Listening comprehension is affected by many factors; anxiety and other affective variables playing a noticeable role in listening comprehension deserve instructors' more attention. In light of Krashen's affective filter hypothesis (1982), anxiety can negatively affect learners' foreign language acquisition, while previous researches indicated that Chinese college students of non-English majors tend to be anxious in English listening. Thus, the efforts at reducing students' listening anxiety level will help to improve their listening comprehension ability.Recently, researches on listening supports have been increasing at home and abroad. Meanwhile, there are many researches on listening anxiety. However, there are insufficient researches concerning about listening instruction methods to release listening anxiety in China and abroad, not to speak of research on the relationship between listening supports and listening anxiety.As a complementary part to the empirical study on the positive effect of listening supports on the reduction of listening anxiety in listening comprehension, the present study was carried out under the guidance of the three fundamental theories, the scaffolding theory, the affective filter hypothesis and the creative constructive model. The purpose was to investigate how five forms of listening supports (vocabulary instruction, topic preparation, question preview, slowed speech rate and repeated input) affect the listening anxiety levels of Chinese college students in their listening comprehension process. The author used the three instruments:the listening anxiety and listening supports questionnaires, the English listening comprehension test, and the post-task interviews to collect data. Participants included 200 students in five intact groups matched in listening ability. Each group used one type of listening supports in the listening comprehension test, then before and after the test their anxiety level were recorded, at last, the correlation between the result of each group's listening supports, their listening test scores and listening anxiety levels were analyzed.Prior the test, the test-takers were uniformly anxious but afterwards, there was significant reduction in anxiety according to type of support. For the high listening proficiency (HLP) students, the use of VI was the most efficient method to reduce their pre-task listening anxiety; the way of RI was more efficient than other four types of listening supports to reduce their post-task listening anxiety. While for the low listening proficiency (LLP) students, the method of SS was more effective to reduce their pre-task listening anxiety while the RI group had the worst effect; the way of RI was the most efficient one to reduce their post-task listening anxiety, and the TP group was the worst one. The method of RI had the best effect on listening comprehension performance of both HLP and LLP students and the VI group had the worst effect. By the interview, the above-mentioned results were found to be caused by students' mentality as the examinee and that HLP students engaged in more actively constructive learning compared with the LLP ones.Research findings indicate that listeners could benefit a lot from listening supports activities since these various activities help to reduce listeners' listening anxiety and to promote their listening comprehension competence. Teachers should help students to make psychological and knowledge preparation by using various types of listening supports during listening instruction and promote the development of their listening comprehension ability continually. Based on the above research analysis and conclusion, some suggestions were put forward for the instruction of English listening in the final chapter. It is expected that the study can contribute to the development of our country's college English listening instruction as well as the improvement of Chinese students' listening comprehension competence.