Motivation, Anxiety And English Learning

In foreign language learning, a lot of modifiable learner factors are generally believed to affect the outcome of foreign language learning, among which are foreign language learning motivation and anxiety that have often been cited as the most important affective variables affecting the students' performance in English learning, In the past two decades a lot of research has been done on foreign language learning motivation and anxiety and has shown that motivation plays a positive role in foreign language learning while there are moderate negative correlations between foreign language anxiety and foreign language performance.To better understand college students' affective state in English learning and try to motivate the college students' enthusiasm and reduce their anxiety in English learning, the author of the thesis consulted the related literature and found that different researchers have different views on the exact meaning of motivation. The behavioral, humanistic, cognitive and social learning theories account for "what is motivation" from different perspectives. Learner motivation is influenced by various factors including socio-cultural factors, classroom environment factors and internal factors, of which the most important is internal factors. Students' goals, feelings, and perceptions determine the motivated behavior and, in turn, academic performance.Language anxiety ranks high among factors affecting language learning. Anxiety can be attributed to many causes, among which are teaching methods that might cause different degrees of anxiety. In the last two decades, the research on the relation of anxiety to language learning has been on the rise. Some researchers and language teachers hold that facilitating anxiety is helpful to enhance learning effect;however, many others state that anxiety is an affective filter factor which hinders the enhancement of language capacity, and its negative effect exceeds the positive, In this case, foreign language teachers are faced with the challenge in the classroom contextas to how to prevent the anxiety-inducing situation and minimize the debilitating anxiety among the students.This thesis is composed of four chapters besides introduction and conclusion. Chapter One reviews the relevant literature concerning foreign language learning motivation and anxiety. Chapter Two elaborates the methodology used in the present research, including the research questions, sample subjects, instruments, research procedures, data collection and analysis procedure. By employing two internationally well-known questionnaires the author carried out a survey on 172 second-year non-English majors in Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering. The* collected data were processed and analyzed by SPSS to explore the correlation between motivation/ anxiety and academic performance of Chinese college students' English learning. Chapter Three centers the results and discussions of this study. The results of the survey are as follows: a) the intensity of motivation and anxiety of the students are a little above the medium range;b) there is no correlation between overall motivation and academic performance;c)There are significant correlations between motivational strength and academic performance;d) there are significant negative correlations between academic performance and overall anxiety and three sub-anxiety categories as well;e) there are no significant differences in motivation and anxiety in terms of gender and proficiency;f) but there are significant differences in motivation and anxiety between more successful and less successful students. Based on the results, the author tried to discuss the related reasons. Chapter Four provides some useful suggestions for enhancing students' motivation and reducing the students' anxiety, such as helping students build a healthy self-concept, arousing students' interest and motivation in English learning, making students recognize their anxiety, creating a favorable English learning classroom climate, establishing a good teacher-student relationship, changing teachers' role and beliefs, etc.Motivation and anxiety are two important affective factors, which can account for the success or failure of foreign language learning to a large extent. Thus, it is safe to arrive at the conclusion that foreign language teaching and learning can be bettered ifthe teacher can enhance the students' English learning motivation and minimize the debilitating anxiety.