The Effects Of Social Variables On English Language Learning Anxiety

Language anxiety, as one of the principal components of language learners' affective factors in EFL/ESL learning, is attracting more and more academic concerns of foreign or second language teaching and research fields. The present thesis, based upon the information obtained from the questionnaire, consisting of a background questionnaire and the FLCAS questionnaire developed by Horwitz et al. (1999), investigates into the correlation between the English language anxiety of 185 senior middle school students to the variables concerned and the variability of their English language anxiety resulted from the variables.Most of the previous related studies deal with language anxiety from school teaching and learning environments. However, this paper attempts to explore English language anxiety from such factors as socio-economic and cultural conditions, students' family backgrounds, students' birthplaces and so on in a certain region. It aims to examine to what extent senior middle school students experience English language anxiety and the effects of anxiety upon English language learning and explore the contributors to English language anxiety in order to adapt the anxiety psychology experienced by senior middle school students in language learning process in case that the effects of the language teaching and learning may be weakened owing to language anxiety.This paper is composed of six parts. The first part starts with a general background analysis of the present situation of English teaching and learning in China, then followed by the definition for the conceptions of anxiety and language anxiety as well as the purpose and significant of the survey study. Part Two reviews the previous studies in this regard at home and abroad. The third part introduces the psychological theories involved in this investigation for a more extensive and deeper understanding of language anxiety from the view point of psychology: Karen Horney's theory of elementary anxiety, Gagne, R.M.'s theory on conditions of learning and Gardner's theory of social psychology. In Part Four, we first advance the hypotheses, then provide some information concerning the subjects, instruments, the procedure of the investigation as well as the data collection and statistical results analysis which falls into four steps: at the outset is presented the general distributive tendency of the variables related to language anxiety; then descriptive analyses are made out of the data in relation to language anxiety; in what follows, an independent-sample T-test is made to find out the factor variability in language anxiety; and in the end, a correlation analysis is designed to examine what correlations exist between the variables concerned and the three anxieties involved inlanguage anxiety: communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation.The fifth part concerns itself with the discussion about the findings obtained from the present survey study.. The paper ends with the six part which mainly contains the implications, the conclusions achieved from this investigation as well as the suggestions for further explorations in this regard.In accordance with the results of data analyses, the conclusions are drawn as follows: 1) Most senior middle school students are experiencing English language anxiety to different extents and up to 1/3 of them are suffering from high English language anxiety. Anxiety exerts negative influences upon English language anxiety. English achievement is negatively correlated to English language anxiety; 2) A significant correlation exists between sex variable and English language anxiety. Males evoke much stronger English language anxiety than females; 3) Students' birthplace variable is in a significant correlation to English language anxiety. Students from urban areas are far more anxious than their counterparts from rural areas; 4) There is a significantly negative correlation between fathers' education degree variable and English language anxiety. No significant correlation emerges between moth...