A Study Of Learners' Foreign Language Anxiety In Classroom Settings

With the advent of humanistic psychology in the 1960s, more and more researchers and instructors at home and abroad have paid their attention to learners' affective variables. A great deal of previous study has shown that affective variables have great impact on language achievement, and it can increase or decrease retention and success in foreign language learning. While among the numerous affective variables, anxiety is quite possibly the affective factor that most pervasively obstructs the learning process. A great deal of previous study was done on the relationship between anxiety and language achievement while there is no agreement on their relationship. Although anxiety research has achieved rich results and is very mature in western countries, studies on foreign language learning anxiety have far fallen behind in China. Since China is a nation with many English learners; therefore, discussions on English classroom anxiety possess both theoretical significance and pragmatic value.The present study utilizes the theoretical model in Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) as a research framework to explore English classroom anxiety among university students, to see if there are significant differences between learners with different gender and family background, and whether students' anxiety levels decrease with the development of educational level, and also to find anxiety-provoking sources and coping strategies. A questionnaire which consists of three parts is used in the study. The first part is personal information, the second part is FLCAS designed by Horwitz et al. (1986), and the third part includes four open-ended questions. The software called Statistical Program for Social Sciences (SPSS) 11.5 is used to analyze the data. There are two groups of subjects involved in the present study. One group is made up of 326 second year non-English majors in China University of Petroleum, and the other group consists of 136 second year students in No.1 Senior Middle School of Lijin. The reason for adopting senior middle school students to the study is to find out whether student's language anxiety levels decrease or not with the development of their educational level.The results show that firstly there does exist English classroom anxiety among the Chinese university students and senior middle school students, and with the development of students' educational level, language anxiety decreases. Secondly, there is a significant negative relationship between achievement and language anxiety. Thirdly, there is no significant difference in anxiety between males and females, and students coming from cities and rural regions.Anxiety is possibly the most pervasive obstruction in English learning. It is hoped that the present study may provide useful insight so as to understand the English classroom anxiety among Chinese students.