Research On English Test Anxiety Of High School Seniors

As a special form of anxiety,test anxiety refers to a kind of psychological state,which is influenced by individual cognitive level,personality tendency and other physical or mental factors.And it takes worry as the basic characteristic.In a certain examination-oriented situation,it shows a kind of psychological state by different degrees of emotional reaction.Since the middle of the 20 th century,test anxiety has been brought into the scientific concept by the field of educational psychology,and special attention has been paid to.Moreover,the newly promulgated English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School in China(abbreviated as the 2017 Edition of the Standard)declared that an evaluation system which takes students as the priority and promotes students’ development comprehensively needs to be established in English curriculum of senior high school.In addition,the emotion,attitude and values shown by students in the process of English learning need to be paid great attention to.It aims to guide students to learn and adjust their goals,learning styles and learning process.Therefore,the importance of emotional attitude in teaching work cannot be ignored.Based on the affective filtering hypothesis and humanism theory,this paper takes senior students in Wuzhou Senior High School in Guangxi as the subjects of investigation,aiming to present the overall situation of English test anxiety of senior students in the high school,and analyzes whether there are significant differences in English test anxiety between male and female,between students in liberal arts and science and whether there is a correlation between English test anxiety and academic achievement.Questionnaire and interview are adopted.The questionnaire was created by Spielberger et al.And it includes three dimensions,namely,worry anxiety,emotional anxiety and general anxiety.Accordingly,the following questions need to be answered in this paper.1)What is the overall situation of the English test anxiety of the senior students in the high school? 2)Are there significant differences in English test anxiety between male and female,between students in liberal arts and science? If so,what are the reasons for it? 3)Is there any correlation between English test anxiety and academic achievement of senior students in the high school? If so,how does it correlate?The results show that the test anxiety of senior students in the high school is at medium level as a whole.Among them,the average value of emotional anxiety is the highest,followed by worry anxiety,and the general anxiety.Secondly,although there is no significant difference in test anxiety between male and female,the level of test anxiety of female is slightly higher than that of male,and the level of the anxiety of students in liberal arts is also slightly higher than that of students in science,because students’ psychological foundation and cognitive style are different.Thirdly,there is a negative correlation between test anxiety and academic achievement.And the three dimensions’ Pearson correlations with the academic achievement are nearly the same.Based on the results of this study,some suggestions are given to relieve the English test anxiety of senior students in the high school.For the school,first,it can create a relaxing learning atmosphere for the students.Second,establishing an evaluation system helps to put forward students’ development.Third,decreasing the times of examination is helpful for students to internalize knowledge in free time.Last but not least,psychologists are invited to offer professional help for students before the entrance college examination.For teachers,figuring out the true reasons for students’ test anxiety is a good way for teachers to prescribe the right “medicine” and teach students wisely.And teachers can design effective teaching objectives and arrange the teaching activities reasonably.Besides,they need to pay attention to the emotion,attitude and values of students in the process of learning English,and guide students to monitor and adjust their English learning goals,learning methods and learning process.For students,they should take priority to have a correct position for themselves and set learning goals.Then,they learn to adopt appropriate strategies to relieve their test anxiety.This paper aims to explore the causes of English test anxiety and put forward some suggestions to relieve test anxiety of senior students in the high school and improve their academic achievement.