A Study Of The Relationship Among Foreign Language Anxiety, Language Learning Strategy Use, And Foreign Language Achievement

Language learning strategy has received considerable attention from researchers with the development of the foreign language teaching study. Language anxiety is one of the variable factors that researchers have given great attention to. Studies about language learning strategy use, language anxiety and language achievement are dated from 1980. The author wants to find the relationships among them, and hopes that teachers can further understand the meaning of the relationships among them from the study, and it can help learners to get more achievement by overcoming language anxiety and using language learning strategy correctly.In 1971, inspired by Carton's study and theories, Rubin started to study the successful foreign language learner's strategies and published her results after that. She found that successful learners were so much magnificently similar to each other, including in psychology characteristics, communication strategy, social strategy and cognitive strategy. From then on, researchers in western countries started to study the factors that influence the foreign language learning achievement.In their studies, language learning strategy use is a new field of study. It begins to be a focus of applied linguistics. Language learning anxiety is worth studying among these factors. MacIntyre (1994) notes that language anxiety is a factor that influences language learning strategy use. Maclntyre and Nole (1996) find that language anxiety is negatively correlated with language learning strategy use. However, no empirical research has been done to investigate the relationship between foreign language anxiety and learning strategy use in China. So the author thinks it is necessary to make a further study about their relationships.Therefore, a survey is conducted to examine the relationship among foreign language anxiety, language learning strategy use, and foreign language achievement. Two questionnaires are employed as the instruments in the present study, in which 600 middle school students who are studying in Zhi Jiang city An Fusi Middle School of Hubei province participated. One is the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) developed by Oxford (1990); The other is the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) developed by Horwitz et al.(1986). This paper tries to answer the following four questions:(1) What is the relationship between language learning strategy use and foreign language achievement? (2) What is the relationship between foreign language anxiety and foreign language achievement? (4) What is the relationship between foreign language anxiety and language learning strategy use? (4) What is the relationship among foreign language anxiety, language learning strategy use and language achievement?The results are as follows:(1) The use of language learning strategies is positively correlated with foreign language achievement. (2) Foreign language anxiety is negatively correlated with foreign language achievement. (3) Foreign language anxiety and language learning strategy use are negatively correlated. (4) The better a language achievement is, the more language learning strategy use is, and the less language anxiety is; The worse a language achievement is, the less language learning strategy use is, and the more language anxiety is.It is hoped that the findings of this study will help foreign language teachers further understand the effects of language learning strategy use and foreign language anxiety on foreign language teaching, which may enable them to help the students learn a foreign language better.