English Language Classroom Anxiety Of Non-English Majors In Independent Colleges And Concerned Strategies

With the development of educational psychology and second language acquisition research, increasing attention has been drawn to the affective variables in foreign language learning, among which foreign language anxiety is an important research subject. Western scholars have made many research in the field and domestic research started later. English learning in China mainly occurs in classroom for lack of natural language context, which is more prone to cause anxiety. And this problem is often neglected in the college English teaching practice. According to Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, anxiety serves as a filter habiting language input and the processing of input, and thus affecting language acquisition and output. A large number of studies have shown that anxiety can also affect students’ confidence, cause irrational belief of students and hinder foreign language learning. Therefore, it is very important for foreign language teachers to identify students’ language anxiety and causes, and use appropriate strategies to help students overcome foreign language learning anxiety.The Affective Filter Hypothesis and humanism serve as the theoretical framework of the present study. For both theories put emphasis on the affective factors of learners, and help teachers to understand the psychological needs of learners, and take appropriate measures to promote their language learning.Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) designed by Horwitz (1986) is employed as a research instrument to obtain data.160non-English major sophomores of Wuhan Bioengineering Institute were selected as the subjects of the study. Analysis on the four component of the scale is conducted using the statistical software SPSS19.0.The results showed that students do experience English classroom anxiety, and anxiety level is higher compared with that of the subjects of other similar studies. The main source of anxiety is test anxiety and communication apprehension. The analysis of the anxiety of different groups of students revealed that gender has no significant effect on anxiety level; boys and girls have almost the same level of anxiety. However, the factors of major and area make significant differences. Students major in science have higher anxiety level than those major in liberal arts, and students from rural areas are more anxious than their counterparts from urban areas. The countermeasures are proposed according to these findings in the hope of reminding the teachers to pay attention to students’ anxiety and identify the cause of the anxiety, and improve teaching methods to help students cope with anxiety and language learning reasonably, thus reduce the negative impact of anxiety to a minimum and improve the effectiveness of foreign language learning.