NON-English Majors' Language Anxiety And Teacher's Strategies

With the continuous progress of study on Second language Acquisition, the issue of language anxiety has been brought into focus of researchers and language teachers. English in China as a foreign language has demonstrated numerous main characteristics of its own. like teacher-centeredness. no language exposure and teaching activities in formal classroom as well. But to Chinese university students, their anxiety in learning English is often ignored by teachers. According to Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, the stressful classroom environment works as a filter preventing easy acquisition and inhibiting learner's ability to take in and process incoming information. An emerging body of research has revealed that anxiety may impair foreign language production and achievement and its negative impact has also been identified at the specific stages of language learning:input, processing, retrieval, and output stage. Furthermore, anxiety is found to cause problems related to self-confidence, mistaken beliefs and ultimately hampering proficiency in the foreign language. Therefore it is important for language teachers to identify the sources of language anxiety in the foreign language classroom to be able to implement appropriate techniques to help students overcome it. This thesis attempts to study on the English classroom anxiety of non-English majors in Southwest Forestry University. By means of a questionnaire and interview, the findings reveal:1) most of the non-English majors experience strong language anxiety in English class; 2) Compared with fear of negative evaluation and negative attitude towards English, communication apprehension is more anxiety-arousal.3) Gender and English proficiency affect anxiety level, but the differences between male and female students, students of high and low proficiency are not very significant; 4) students hold incorrect beliefs about language learning;The findings remind the teacher of focusing on student's debilitating anxiety, pouring more efforts into identifying the sources of anxiety, so they will be able to prevent it, respond to it appropriately, and help students enjoy learning foreign language.