The Effect Of Non-English Major Postgraduates' Anxiety On Their English Oral Performance And Countermeasures

More and more people nowadays realize that "the affective component contributes at least as much and often more to language learning than cognitive skills" (Stern, 1983:386). Investigation into the "effect of affect" has aroused people's great attention. Among various affective factors, language anxiety, a kind of complex psychological phenomenon specific to language learning, is considered as one of the key affective factors and has been concerned by many researchers because it is common in language learning and it has great influence on language performance. People usually make a distinction between "facilitating anxiety" and "debilitating anxiety" (Alpert and Haber, 1960, Scovel, 1978). Though some language researchers think that facilitating anxiety does exist in language learning, most language researches show a negative relationship between anxiety and learner achievement. Up to now, researchers at home and abroad have done much research on the effect of anxiety on the second language learning. However, most of their research is about college students. Little research has been done about postgraduates, and even less research has been done on the effect of postgraduates' anxiety on their oral performance in Chinese context. So this thesis is devoted to exploring the problems related to postgraduates' anxiety.Postgraduates are among the brightest and best of our country and among them non-English major postgraduates constitute the major part. However, most of the non-English postgraduates are good at English grammar and vocabulary but poor in speaking English. With the advent of globalization and the development of the economy of our country, more and more talent persons with communicative ability in English are needed. And it is obvious that non-English major postgraduates' English oral ability now is a far cry from the expectations of our country. So to study factors concerning their oral ability is an urgent task facing us.In this thesis, the author investigated 155 non-English major postgraduates of Grade 06 in Hefei University of Technology in the hope of finding out their levels of language anxiety, especially the relationship between their anxiety and their oral performance. In the survey, the participants were asked to complete the FLCAS, one questionnaire on the causes and consequences of their anxiety and they were also given an oral test. Their results of the FLCAS, the oral test and the questionnaire on the causes and consequences of anxiety were collected and analyzed. The results showed that non-English major postgraduates experience significantly high language anxiety in learning English. Their mean scores of the FLCAS were 90.3 . Based on the results of the FLCAS and the scores of the oral test, Pearson Correlation Coefficient was applied to examine the relationship between their anxiety and their oral performance. The results indicated that non-English major postgraduates' anxiety was in significantly negative correlation with their oral performance. (r = -0.52) The higher the anxiety was, the lower scores in the oral test would be. Then 40 students were chosen from the 155 participants to participate in one experiment. The author experimented on the 40 students for one semester by applying several measures in classroom teaching to help the students to diminish their anxiety. These measures included approaching students to know and understand their needs and desires; creating a relaxing learning environment in classroom by providing students with various cooperative activities and changing teachers' roles, etc. At the end of the semester, the 40 participants were asked to complete the FLCAS again, and were given 2^nd oral test. Besides, they also answered another questionnaire on the effects of the measures that had been applied in the classroom teaching. Then some significant changes were found in the 2^nd FLCAS and 2^nd oral test. The experiment revealed that the measures that had been used in the classroom teaching were effective and were welcomed by students to different degrees because after the experiment the participants' anxiety had been lowered and their scores in the 2^nd oral test had been raised significantly on an average, which was also proved by a T test . Students responses to the questionnaire on the effectiveness of the measures revealed that changes in their 2^nd FLCAS and 2^nd oral test were the results of the measures used. Furthermore, the experiment demonstrated that students most welcomed the measure of creating a relaxing learning environment in the classroom by providing various cooperative activities, which implies that traditional classroom mode should be replaced by students-centred mode where teachers should become organizers, facilitators and supporters instead of dominators. Finally, through the survey and the experiment, the author found it extremely necessary to explore some more problems concerning anxiety in the future. So some suggestions were put forward for teachers and researchers to think about and to be concerned about so that problems related to anxiety would be emphasized and explored more profoundly.