A Correlative Study On English Majors' Language Anxiety And Their Involvement In Integrated Skills Of English Course

With the advent of humanistic psychology in the 1960s, the focus of language teaching shifts from teachers to language learners, which makes the research on the learning subjects and the actual situation in language classroom become the mainstream. Therefore, affective factors of the learners and classroom interactions become the focus of the scholars at home and abroad.Language anxiety is one of the most important affective factors, and students'class involvement is also essential in classroom interaction. Through searching the major Chinese journals for the related literature on the web site of CNKI Chinese Academic Journals,the author finds there have been a lot of researches on anxiety and class involvement respectively, but the study on the interrelationship between anxiety and students'class involvement from the perspective of language learning process is less touched upon, not to mention the study on a certain course of the English majors. Therefore, this thesis makes tentative study on the correlation between language anxiety and class involvement in the course Integrated Skills of English (ISE) from the perspective of language learning process.The present study is conducted through the quantitative and qualitative analysis with questionnaires being its major instruments which are further supplemented by interviews and classroom observation. The subjects in this study consist of 261 English major students from three different grades in Guangxi University, Guangxi Teachers Education University and Guilin University of Technology. The research questions are as listed as follows:1) Do English majors undergo any language anxiety in ISE course? What are the characteristics of their language anxiety?2) Do English majors all participate in classroom activities in ISE course? What are the characteristics of their class involvement?3) What is the correlation between language anxiety level and participation frequency among different grades of students in ISE course? 4) What is the correlation between language anxiety and class involvement in ISE course?All these questions have been answered by statistical data:1) There is a certain degree of language anxiety existing among English majors in ISE course. In the four anxiety dimensions,"fear of negative evaluation"tops the others, followed by"communication apprehension", and"test anxiety"ranks the third while"general ISE class anxiety"is the last.2) There is a certain degree of class involvement among English majors in ISE course. The activity participation frequency in"group work"ranks first among the four interactive patterns, while that in"whole class work"ranks the second, which is closely followed by"pair work", and"individual work".3) There is correlation existing in language anxiety level and activity participation frequency among different grades of students in ISE course. The language anxiety level of the freshmen is lower than that of the sophomores and the juniors, while the participation frequency of the freshman is higher than that of the sophomores and the juniors. A conclusion can be drawn that English majors'language anxiety increases while their class involvement frequency decreases after three years'study of ISE course.4) Language anxiety is negatively correlated with students'class involvement in ISE course.The pedagogical implications, limitations of the present study and suggestions for the future study are also elaborated in this thesis.