On Anxiety In English Listening Comprehension In Vocational Technical College

As a common emotional experience of human beings, anxiety has attracted psychologists' attention for a long time. Since the 1960s, language researchers have come to realize that anxiety is also one of the important affective variables in language acquisition or language learning, and it varies in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Since listening involves serious time constrains on processing, the listener should respond instantaneously. But in the past years of English teaching and learning in vocational technical college in China, reading and grammar have drawn more attention than speaking and listening. As a result, many students are weak at listening and fail to comprehend what they listen to easily. To them, listening comprehension can be very stressful, and anxiety undermines listening comprehension. As the negative role of anxiety frustrates the students, the aim of improving listening comprehension becomes rather difficult to achieve. Therefore, the avoidance or reduction of anxiety is of significance. However, few people have done much on anxiety in listening comprehension of English majors in the vocational technical college. For this reason, studying anxiety becomes the main concern in this thesis.This thesis first surveys what have been achieved by psychologists and language researchers in the study of anxiety, explores the causes and nature of anxiety, discusses the relationship between language anxiety and language acquisition, gives a definition of listening anxiety. By analyzing the characteristics of listening comprehension, it points out the possibility of common existence of intense listening anxiety of English majors in the vocational technical college, and the necessity of reducing the anxiety. With the help of questionnaires, it obtains the information that the students do experience intense anxiety while listening. The results from questionnaires and listening testing show that there is a negative correlation between the degree of students' anxiety and their scores. From results...