A Study Of The Correlation Between Listening Anxiety And Perceptual Learning Style Of English Majors

In the recent decades, the world of second and foreign language teaching has experiencedgradual change of research focus from teacher teaching to learner learning, under the influenceof the individualization movement. Learner’s individual differences, of which languagelearning anxiety and learning style are two important factors, has attracted researchers’ attention.In the1990s, researchers began to examine learners’ anxiety in terms of specific language skills.With the increasing improvement of requirements for foreign language listening and speakingabilities, scholars start to focus their attention to the influence of anxiety on listeningcomprehension. However, most of them concentrate on sources of listening anxiety and thecorresponding methods to alleviate it as well as the relationship between listening anxiety andlistening proficiency in language learning. Few empirical studies have been designed toinvestigate the relationship between listening anxiety and learning style.This study intends to explore the correlation between listening anxiety and perceptuallearning style preferences of English majors, so as to expand learners’ learning styles, toalleviate their listening anxiety and to improve their listening performance. A survey of240English majors of a key local university in Shandong province was conducted with ForeignLanguage Listening Anxiety Scale by Kim, Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaireby Joy Reid and oral interview. All data were typed into SPSS17.0for descriptive statistics,frequency analysis and Pearson Correlation analysis, so as to examine the general tendency oflistening anxiety and perceptual learning style preferences as well as the correlation betweenthese two variables.The final results of the study are as follows:(1) Listening anxiety is a very commonphenomenon in listening comprehension.(2) English majors prefer kinesthetic learning style,followed by tactile, visual, auditory, group and individual learning style successively.(3) Thereexisted a significant positive relationship between listening anxiety and visual learning style,and a negative correlation between listening anxiety and auditory learning style as well asindividual learning style. Naturally, the findings of this study have important implications forlearners and language teachers. As for learners, first of all, in order to alleviate listening anxiety,they should have exact understanding of listening anxiety and adopt listening strategy flexiblyto build their own confidence. In addition, it is important for them to expand their own learningstyles to adapt themselves to different learning environments. For language teachers, theyshould adopt various teaching methods to alleviate students’ listening anxiety and help studentsto improve their confidence of participating in English learning activities actively. However, there still exist some deficiencies in the present study, such as the small size ofsample and insufficient research methods. Nevertheless, this research has basically reached theexpected goals and has provided some valuable pedagogical references and suggestions forfurther language teaching.