| Traditional ways of language teaching focus on how to teach from the teachers'point of view. From 1970s, experts of language teaching realize the importance of studying the language learners in language teaching. That's to say, the emphasis of research has shifted from external factors of teaching and learning to internal factors of learners, especially the students'affective factors. The researchers abroad and at home have been paying more and more attention to affective factors in language learning, which include foreign language anxiety, attitude, motivation, and self-perceived proficiency. Among these factors, foreign language anxiety is a complicated mental phenomenon specific to language learning and has a strong impact on the process and achievements of learning.There are many researches on foreign language anxiety in recent years, but when the author overviews the researches, the author finds that the researches on foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA) are not deep and comprehensive, and those concerning this topic mainly focus on the correlation between FLLA and listening proficiency, the correlation between FLLA and listening strategies, the effects of FLLA on listening. To the author's knowledge, there hasn't been any research on effects of teaching method on FLLA, so this thesis applies task-based language teaching (TBLT) to listening teaching and tries to answer the following questions:1) What level of FLLA do higher vocational students experience?2) What are the factors causing students'FLLA?3) Does the level of FLLA correlate with the students'English proficiency?4) Is TBLT helpful in alleviating or controlling FLLA in classroom English listening teaching? If yes, in what ways?This research takes 146 students from Chinese major in a higher vocational school as the subjects, who are divided into three groups, Group H, Group M and Group L, according to their scores in entrance examination, and tries to investigate their FLLA by two questionnaires and two English test papers. The questionnaires are modified from Horwitz's Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and Kim's Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale(FLLAS), but there are 10 additional statements in the second questionnaire focusing on the students' feeling towards TBLT in the whole semester; the test papers are designed according to the requirements of the course and the requirements of Practical English Test for College Students. After carefully analyzing the statistics that have been obtained from the experiments, the author gets the following conclusions:1) FLLA is a common phenomenon among higher vocational school students. They are suffering moderate FLLA in class.2) FLLA is negatively related to the students'listening proficiency, the higher level the students suffer from FLLA, the lower level they perform in listening comprehension.3) There are several factors of FLLA, including difficulty of listening material, tension in listening process, fear of negative evaluation and lack of listening strategy. Not all those factors are negatively related to students'listening proficiency. Difficulty of listening material, however, shows no significant correlation with it. In TBLT, those factors have been effectively alleviated.4) Task-based language teaching can effectively alleviate students' FLLA, relieve the influence of FLLA factors, and improve students' listening proficiency, as well as help students master listening strategies. But the positive effects of TBLT on FLLA are more influential for Group H and Group M, and less influential for Group L. At the same time, students haven't shown any interest on some types of tasks such as discussion, after-listening task and report. They admit that they are more likely to get anxiety from those tasks. Having applied TBLT in listening teaching for a whole semester, the author also gives some constructive suggestions on how to teach more efficiently in listening teaching, and hope that it would be helpful for practical teaching and further study. |
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