A Study On Learner Anxiety And English Listening In A Computer-Based Multimedia Environment

Listening, among the basic skills in English language teaching and learning process, serves as the primary input end and plays a leading role among the others since the quantity and quality of the language input will directly and largely determine the quantity and quality of the language output. Krashen's Input Hypothesis indicates that intensive input of the comprehensible listening materials will greatly improve the learners' language ability. In a word, listening is fundamental for language acquisition because it provides the input that is necessary for the acquisition process to occur. But due to the lack of a real and rich language environment for English learning in China, listening performance will be enormously restricted by the linearity of the time and the performance of listening comprehension will be negatively affected by many factors, such as limited knowledge on vocabulary or background culture of the target language, inefficient employment of learning strategies, and most of all, the state of affective factors or emotional variables. Among these affective variables, improper amount of anxiety stands out as one of the main blocking factors for effective language learning. Most of the researchers, after intensive studies, have recognized that the anxiety in language learning which affects foreign language learners is of a special kind, named by Horwitz et al. (1991) as Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA). It has been defined by the authors as "a feeling of tension, apprehension and nervousness associated with the situation of learning a foreign language" (Horwitz, 1991). Since the identification of the special anxiety in language learning, more and more attention has been paid on the studies of the relevance between the language learners' degrees of anxiety and their consequent learning performances. Various theories and methods have been implemented in the English classrooms, but the results are not always very satisfying. There is an urgent need for the teachers and researchers to find an effective and yet convenient way to enhance the listening performance for the English learners in China where a natural lingual environment is not available.Remaining as a main block as it is, listening has still taken a central position in L2 acquisition. Krashen (1988) in his Affective Filter Hypothesis explains how learners of the L2 'let the input in' for sufficient comprehension. It has been explained that the lower the filter, the more open forsecond language acquisition the learner would be (Brett, 1997). But this idea has been considered vague so far and much more positive empirical studies should be performed to evaluate the judgment. On the other hand, arguments supporting multimedia have prevailed in education in recent years as the relevant technologies have been advancing. Praise for it is, however, rather based largely on intuitions instead of the results of empirical studies. Learning a language via individualized instruction with the computer—especially when audio and video are involved—is an extremely appealing proposition.The present study tries to explore the relevance between the learning environment and the degree of learner's anxiety in a multimedia environment, i.e. it tries to evaluate how a computer-based multimedia environment will alleviate L2 learners' anxieties during the listening process, thus bridge the gap between research findings and classroom practice and help teachers find suitable ways of improving their students' listening performance.This thesis consists of six parts. Part One is an introduction focusing on the aims and significance of the study. This study attempts to carry out empirical research on English minors in College of Foreign Languages and Literature of NWNU by implementing two different learning environments of English listening to prove that the traditional tape-recorded-and-textbook-based classroom environment will cause high anxiety and the achievements of listening comprehension will be hindered consequently while CBME is more effective than the tape-recorded-and-tex...