A Study On The Relationship Between Oral English Output And Language Anxieties Of The Non-English Majors'

More and more linguists, language researchers and teachers have been aware of the importance of the language communicative competence since Hymes' concept of communicative competence was introduced to China in 1980s. In the 21^st century, oral English proficiency is becoming more and more important with China's entry into WTO. And College English Teaching Syllabus has promoted oral English to a higher level, thus demand a higher goal for cultivating students' spoken ability. Yet the current state of non-English majors' oral outputs in Chinese college English classroom is not so satisfactory.In the practical English teaching in China, we find that although Chinese students' overall English proficiency has developed through study during junior and senior middle school and then the four-year study in college, they have an unbalanced development of the four skills—the oral proficiency is always much lower than their ability of reading, writing and even listening. Since there is no oral class for most of non-English major students in China, therefore, it is very important to know how to train students' oral ability in intensive reading classes. Altogether 156 freshmen from five different majors in LNIT(Liaoning Institue of technology) as well as five teachers participated in the research, and the research results show that most of the students regard themselves as inactive learners in the English class, which shows that the students' oral output problem is serious and cannot be neglected any more. This paper attempts to investigate one of the reasons for it—debilitating influence of language anxiety on students' oral English output in the classroom.Since Krashen put forward the affective filter hypothesis, more and more concern has been paid to the anxiety problem which ranks high among affective factors influencing language learning. With this in mind, this study focuses on the current oral output state in college English classroom and the relationship between the foreign language anxiety and their classroom oral participation. The purpose of the study is to put forward a list of strategies to cope with student's anxiety in English learning so as to promote the students oral English output in the class and improve their communicative competence.This dissertation consists of six chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces the background of oral teaching and learning research in Chinese college English classroom, its present state of oral output, the possible relationship...