Examination Of Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Self-Schema For Undergraduate Students

As the greatest barrier for Chinese ESL learners, the problem of Dumb English is urgently waited to sovle for Chinese ESL instructors and researchers. In a sense, Dumb Enlish is reflected as being ESL speaing anxiety,Therefore, the study of ESL speaking anxiety is important to unclose the mechanism of Dumb English's coming into being.This study explored the structure, categories, distribution,development features as well as the processing features of undergraduate students as ESL learners' speaking anxiety self-schema from the perspective of self-schema.The empirical studies of this paper are consisting of two parts. The first one is about the structure categories, distribution and developmental features of speaking anxiety self-schema (FLSASQ) of college students.The result shows that FLSAS is a construct of self knowledge,including of six dimensions as low self-efficacy, low self-esteem, avoidance tendency, less active tendency,communication apprehension, and fear of negative evaluation.By means of K-means of cluster analysis, ESL learners can be categorized as five groups of active low speaking anxiety ESLS learners, avoiding low speaking anxiety ESLS learners, neutral speaking anxiety ESLS learners, active high speaking anxiety ESLS learners, and avoiding high speaking anxiety ESLS learners.The distributing features were found in that high speaking anxiety groups are the majority of ESL learners; there lies significant differences between genders, among grades and university levels.Several development qualities have also been found. First, Chinese college students hold negative FLSAS generally. Second, there is a significant gender difference among Chinese college students, and boys tend to be more negative than girls. Thirdly, a significant difference among grades is also found. Lastly, there lies significant difference among various levels of universities. Generally speaking, students from a municipal key university own the most positive speaking self-schema, followed by those from a state owned key university and students from an average municipal college reveive the most negative self schema.The second part is comprised of three experiments. Experiment 1, containing two subexperiments,aims to explore whether high speaking anxiety group(HSA)have attentional bias under preconscious and conscious level.The result shows that HAS tend to have an attentional bias under preconscious level towards situational words, while no attentional bias is found in conscious level. Experiment 2 aims to explore if HAS are characterized by an inferential bias. They did demonstrate a content-specific interpretation and judgmental biases that also occurred in positive and negative English speaking events. Experiment 2 aims to explore whether HSA tend to a memory bias. The result shows that HAVE are charaterise by a memory bias both in the process of coding and recognition towards situational words. The factors of discriminating ability and discriminating creterio were excluded, therefore, we concluded that the difference of corrct words recognition between HAS and LAS due to different processing level for them. HAS are regarded to process situational words in a deeper level.As the first study of speaking anxiety in the view of self-schema,what has been done will be helpful to foreign language workers as well as researchers in many fields as the correct discrimation of different groups of English speaking population, provide advices for teachers in their classroom instruction as further the studies in foreign language.