A Correlational Study Of Foreign Language Anxiety And Cognitive Style (FI/FD) Among Business English Students

In recent years, affective factors in language learning have been paid attention toby more and more researchers and foreign language teachers. Foreign languagelearning anxiety, as one of the most important factors which may affect the languagelearning, has also been intensively studied. However, emotion and cognition are nottwo completely unrelated concepts. Positive emotions may significantly improve thelearners’ cognitive ability, which means the emotions of the students are closelyassociated with their cognitive style.For language learning foreign language anxiety and cognitive style are beingstudied as independent factors. Research which combing the two and discussing therelationships between foreign language anxiety and cognitive style was rare. The aimof this research is to focus on the relationship between foreign language anxiety andlearners’ cognitive style.In this quantitative study, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS)designed by Horwitz and Embedded Figures Test adopted by Psychology Departmentof Beijing Normal University are used to measure the overall state of English learninganxiety and the cognitive style of business English majors in School of Inter-culturalStudy in Jiang Xi Normal University. All data was analyzed with the help of SPSS17.0.The Conclusions of the study are as follows: firstly there does exist a certainlevel of English learning anxiety among the business English majors in School ofInter-cultural Study in Jiang Xi Normal University. Secondly, among the fourdimensions of English learning anxiety, fear of negative evaluation ranks highest andtest anxiety lowest in the field-independence students. Thirdly, fear of negativeevaluation ranks also highest in the field-dependence students among the fourdimensions of English learning anxiety and communication apprehension anxietyranks the lowest. Fourthly, no significant difference has been found between field-independent and field-dependent students in their language anxiety andindividual items such as item07, item17, item20, item26, item28, item29showsignificant differences between field-independent and field-dependent.Based on the above analysis, some pedagogical implications are offered in thisstudy. And the limitations of the present study and the suggestions for the futureresearch in this field are pointed in the end of this study.