A Study On Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Of Chinese University Non-English Majors

Since the 1970s, second language acquisition has gradually aroused people's interest, and great progress has been made in this field. Many teachers and researchers have paid much attention to learners' affective variables, shifting from the focus on external factors of teaching and learning to internal factors of learners. Foreign language anxiety, as one of the most important affective variables, is a kind of complicated mental phenomenon specific to language learning. Horwitz et al. (1986) defined foreign language anxiety as "a distinct complex of language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process". The studies in the past three decades have repeatedly confirmed that foreign language anxiety has a negative effect on language learning process and is one of the best predictors in accounting for individual differences in language learning success. Through literature review, we find that most studies have focused on the debilitating aspect of anxiety but ignored the facilitating one on learners. Therefore, it is significant to study the facilitating aspect of anxiety, which helps learners have a better understanding of their language anxiety level and provides useful evidence for teachers to improve their listening teaching and learning.Listening comprehension is the most common form of language comprehension. According to the statistics of American methodologists W. M. Rivers & M. S. Temperly, listening accounts for 45% of communicative activities, which obviously stands in the first place of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. At the same time, influenced by the reform of English teaching and learning, many people have gradually realized the importance of improving listening teaching and learning, and a lot of new researches have been generated. Theresearchers, however, have neglected an important dimension of the listening process, the affective factors, in particular, the factor of anxiety.In the field of anxiety study, most researchers have focused their attention on general foreign language learning anxiety. More specific anxiety like language-skill specific anxiety such as listening anxiety has been neglected. Therefore, this thesis sets out to study the influence of foreign language listening anxiety in listening comprehension. The focus is on the correlation between foreign language listening anxiety and listening proficiency of university non-English majors in the Chinese context. Furthermore, the thesis also explores the causes of listening anxiety, the influence of learners' background factors and the listening anxiety coping strategy.This study adopts two instruments including questionnaires and interviews for a survey on listening anxiety with 180 students from Hunan Normal University and Nanhua University as its subjects. The results show that there exists a certain correlation between listening anxiety and listening proficiency. The two aspects of anxiety—facilitating anxiety and debilitating anxiety are significantly correlated. Facilitating anxiety and listening proficiency are positively correlated, and debilitating anxiety and listening proficiency are negatively related. Statistic analysis also shows an influence of learners' background factors on listening proficiency and a certain correlation with listening anxiety. The thesis then analyzes the causes of listening anxiety and coping strategies of learners. By doing so, we find that stress caused by the difficulties of listening materials, poor English proficiency, unfamiliarity with background knowledge, lack of listening skill and nervousness in listening activities are the major factors accounting for listening anxiety.