On Language Anxiety And Its Effect Upon L2 Learning Of College Students

Anxiety is one of the most important affective factors in foreign language (FL) learning. American psycholinguist Horwitz defines language anxiety as"a distinct complex of self-perception, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process". Research into language anxiety started from the studies of individual learner differences in the early 1970s. Affective factors constitute an important part in research that views language learners as subjects. Hence research into language anxiety has gained increasing attention ever since.There has been an upsurge in research into language anxiety in the past thirty years, when researchers considered anxiety as an important affective factor in explaining the individual learner differences in FL learning.Researches show that anxiety is prevalent among FL learners. Anxiety, with various manifestations, is found to be of negative correlation with language achievements. And it is even said to be a good predicator of language achievements. It correlates with many factors, such as learners'self-perception, classroom competitiveness, teachers'questioning, etc. Though a wealth of fruits have been achieved in this field related to anxiety abroad, few can be found in China, which is to be filled in this thesis.The research in this paper deals with anxiety of non-English majors of Chinese college English learners in relation to language proficiency, age, learning experience and gender, and makes an exploratory discussion on the sources leading to anxiety. Based on these, the measures to reduce anxiety are proposed for pedagogical purpose.The research in this thesis is conducted on the basis of questionnaire. The participants in this study are 308 students in the leading university, Southeast University. The questionnaire"English Language Classroom Anxiety Scale"(ELCAS) is the modified version based on Horwitz's Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS). Data analyses are conducted on ELCAS and its three subcomponents: communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. Data are analyzed with the aid of SPSS.The main findings in this paper are as follows:Firstly, the author shows that anxiety exists among Chinese tertiary-level students learning English by providing an objective statistical description of anxiety reflected in ELCAS.Secondly, the correlational analysis between the 89 freshmen's English grades in College Entrance Examination and anxiety demonstrates that there exists a negative correlation between language achievements and anxiety. No association is found between anxiety and age.Thirdly, it is found that anxiety is not affected by grade, gender or the interaction of gender and grade, except that there is a significant difference in communication apprehension and fear of negative evaluation based on gender. Further simple effects test reveals a significant difference in English language classroom anxiety and its three subcomponents at grade 1 level between both genders and a significant...