English Listening Classroom Anxiety Of Non-English Majors

Psychologically speaking, anxiety refers to the intense and enduring negative feeling caused by vague and dangerous stimuli from the outside as well as the unpleasant emotional experience involved, such as anticipation, vexation and fear. As early as the 1940s and 50s, anxiety became the focus of educational psychology in Western countries. The 1970s witnessed the development of second language acquisition research when the emphasis of research shifted from external factors of teaching and learning to internal factors of learners. Many researchers then paid attention to the study of foreign language anxiety (FLA), which is a complicated mental phenomenon specific to language learning and is defined as a distinct complex of apprehension arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process. The studies in the past three decades repeatedly confirmed that foreign language anxiety is one of the best predictors in accounting for individual differences in language learning success, and that it is proved to be one of the most essential and influential affective factors. These previous studies have reached consensus on the relationship between affective variables and foreign language learning, that is, there exist persistent negative correlations between foreign language anxiety and foreign language achievement, self-perceived proficiency and motivation.Although Chinese researchers have already realized the negative role foreign language anxiety plays in English learning, relevant investigations are rather few. Through a survey of relevant research literature, we find that most studies have focused their attention on general foreign language anxiety, but language-skill specific anxiety such as listening anxiety has long been neglected. Therefore, based on the fruitful previous studies, this thesis sets out to focus on the study of English listening classroom anxiety (ELCA) of non-English majors, investigate the influence anxiety has on listening comprehension, further discuss the potential sources of ELCA and suggest possible coping strategies.The present study adopts three instruments including observation, questionnaires...