Foreign Language Anxiety Of Non-English Majors: Its Correlation With The Choice Of Learning Strategies

Under the same learning conditions, there is a great learning gap among those foreign language learners during their learning process. The foreign language teaching researchers have paid a close attention to this problem since 1970's. At that time the research on second language acquisition has been transferred from "how to teach" to "how to learn". And more and more researches on individual language learners appeared in this field in which affective factors and learning strategies are two important components.The earlier research results of home and abroad shown that the affective factors greatly influenced foreign language learning. Among these factors anxiety was regarded as one of the crucial psychological variables. Language anxiety is a typical and complex psychological phenomenon of language learning. Many language learners even mastered language strategies effectively, and may know when and where they use those strategies and use what kind of strategies, but they didn't choose them because of the influencing of these psychological factors. So this paper will focus on the correlation between foreign language anxiety and the choice of learning strategies.On the basis of the theory of Krashen's affective filter hypothesis, the author used Horwitz et al's FLCAS (1986a) and Oxford's SILL (1990) to investigate 156 non-English major sophomores of Guangxi University. The independent variable in this study is taken as the foreign language anxiety; while the dependent variable as the English leaming strategies. Correlation between these two variables is analyzed with SPSS 13.0. The author also raises three hypotheses: 1) on the whole, foreign language anxiety is negatively correlated with the choice of learning strategies; 2) students of high and low anxiety in overall FLCAS prefer to choose different learning strategies; 3) students of high and low anxiety in subcategories of overall anxiety prefer to choose different learning strategies.The results of the study reveal that most of the learners experienced anxiety in the process of foreign language learning. On the basis of an overall analysis, test anxiety is the most obvious one and next to it is communication apprehension. The overall anxiety is positively correlated with each subcategory. This result accords with the data of the descriptive statistics. All these results confirm the necessity of the present study.The statistics indicates that anxiety is negatively correlated with the choice of learning strategies (the coefficient was -.687) and that the quantities and types of the strategies chosen by the learners are closely connected with the levels of anxiety (high anxiety learners prefer to choose cognitive strategies and compensation strategies; low anxiety learners prefer to choose metacognitive and compensation strategies and they chose the fewest cognitive strategies). Furthermore, the results of the present study are discussed and corresponding implications for reducing foreign language anxiety are proposed.