EFL Listening Anxiety And Motivation

Since 1980s, learners' affective factors in foreign langue learning have attracted the attention of many educators and scholars. Anxiety and motivation, as the key factors among the affective variables, have captured headlines among the researches. Most researches in psychology and linguistics showed that learners' affective factors are important roles which can not be neglected in language teaching and learning. However, most previous studies focused on general anxiety, neglecting the dimensions of language-skill-specific anxieties and motivations, and the anxiety and motivation concerning in listening are especially limited. Before the present study, the present author has gained a lot from the students who are the subjects of the present study later and found that listening anxiety is a typical problem which is broadly discussed among the students, and which can indicate the realistic value and need of the present study. Thus, a motivation of the present study is aroused.Implicating by the present related researches and theories, the present study took the English major students at Guangxi Normal University as the subjects mainly to investigate the students'listening anxiety in listening process and to explore the potential sources of listening anxiety and listening motivation tendency, which can provide targeted assistance in listening teaching and references for the related study. The present study adopts the methods of questionnaire, interview and classroom observation firstly to investigate the listening anxiety and listening motivation among 149 sophomore English major students. The questionnaires are Chinese-version of personal background and English listening anxiety scale so as to collect the related quantitative information. Then the qualitative information is collected from 12 interviewees who were randomly selected and the class observation of the listening class. Through Statistic Passage for Social Science (SPSS10.0), descriptive statistics, comparison of means, reliability analysis and Pearson correlation were operated and analyzed with the quantitative data. Qualitative data of interview and classroom observation was also objectively analyzed.What the findings of the study indicate are as follows:(1) The English major students experienced a moderate level of English listening anxiety, which was negatively related to students'self-perceiving listening proficiency, and students' listening anxiety level in test will obviously higher than that in listening class; (2) Features of listening material is the main cause of listening anxiety. Objective factors in listening process such as the limitation of time and space and the limited playing count, self-perceiving factors of listening, listening habits, influence of listening result, etc. can be treated as the leading factors of listening anxiety; (3)Teachers' class behavior is another main factor that causes students' listening anxiety in listening class, which can always make the students excessively concentrate on listening result; (4)The majority of the students reported that their listening motivation is always at the ordinary level, and which, according to the interviews, can be categories sequentially into practical motivation, interest motivation and test motivation, and both practical motivation and test motivation can play a positive role in listening while test motivation may reduce students' listening interests; (5)Students' self-perceiving listening motivation is negatively related to listening anxiety. At the same time, listening anxiety may influence students' listening motivation and motivation type also may cause listening anxiety.As for proposing suggestions according to China's English listening education and the application of constructivism in listening class nowadays, it is implicated that to consider how to play the positive role in listening is more important than to reduce students' listening anxiety; A positive effect of listening motivation is urgently needed for individual's listening motivation type; Suitable application of constructivism in listening teaching should be students-based which are concerning students'previous knowledge but not the materials-accumulated.