A Research On Language Anxiety

Anxiety, as a part of human mental experience, is referred to as a kind of abnormal psychology. Psychologists define it as a feeling of tension associated with a sense of threat of danger when the source of the danger is unknown. Horwitz (1986) describes foreign language anxiety as a distinct complex of self–perception, belief, feeling, and behaviors related to foreign language learning and using for communication beyond the language classroom.During the process of foreign language learning, a large number of learners have been bothered by the feeling of anxiety which has brought much influence on their learning achievement. The concept of"Foreign Language Anxiety"or"Language Anxiety"was first proposed by Horwitz in 1960s. Research on foreign language learning includes the definition of foreign language anxiety (Horwitz and Cope, 1986), the categorization of foreign language anxiety (Spieberger, 1983), the components of foreign language anxiety (Horwitz and Cope, 1986), the classification of foreign language anxiety (Albert and Haber, 1960; Scovel, 1991), the correlates of language anxiety (Daly and Buss, 1984; Richmond and MacCroskey, 1988), the individual learners difference of foreign language anxiety (Ellis,1994), the measures of foreign language anxiety (Horwitz and Cope, 1986; Spieberger, 1983). Research concerned has shown that there is a correlation between foreign language anxiety and foreign language learning achievement (Young, 1991; Gardner, 1985;Chastain, 1975; Kleinmann, 1997; Phillips, 1992; Cheng et al., 1999; Aida, 1994; Horwitz et al., 1986). All these findings may bring some pedagogical implications ( Wang Caikang,2001, 2002,etc.), So far, some researches on language anxiety in Chinese context have been conducted. However, they still remain at a general level without paying enough attention to regional difference and individual learners difference. Since China is the country with the largest foreign language learning population, it is worthwhile to do more research in Chinese setting so as to further the study on foreign language anxiety.Based on the above theories, this thesis attempts to carry out an empirical study on...