The Effect Of Network-based Language Teaching On Reading Competence-A Study Of How To Lower Learners' Foreign Language Anxiety

In the advent of the computer and network,people's economic mode and cultural belief have changed.At the same time,there is also great effect on English learning.Throughout the history,foreign language teachers and language researchers have made great efforts to explore why some students learn it well and why some learn English strenuously.Foreign language anxiety is different from the other kind of anxiety.It has sometimes negative effect on foreign language proficiency,learning process,exam proficiency,foreign language communication competence,self-respect and confidence.However,researchers have not achieved the mutual recognition on whether anxiety made bad effect on foreign language proficiency and whether bad foreign language proficiency caused the anxiety(Macintyre,1995).Network-based language teaching is now playing a prominent role in assisting language learning, which is a new teaching mode,with multimedia network as background,of utilizing web resources in English teaching.How to develop the students' language learning competence,especially the reading competence and how to control the negative effect of foreign language anxiety in the learning process have become an important subject in the English teaching reform.This thesis is divided into five chapters:Chapter One is a brief introduction to the background and significance of the study.That apart,it presents the research questions.Chapter Two is the literature review.There are five parts in this chapter: Part One introduces network-based language teaching;Part Two,foreign language anxiety,Part Three,language anxiety and foreign lauguage learning;Part Four, reading teaching and NBLT and Part Five introduction of some previous studies. Chapter Three delineates the research methodology,including research questions and hypotheses,subjects,study instruments,description of the experiment,data collection and data analysis.In the fourth chapter,the research results of the quantitative and the qualitative approaches are presented,and data are analyzed and discussed as research findings.In Chapter Five,conclusion will be drawn,the summary of the findings, pedagogical implications and limitations for further study will be suggested.The subjects of the study are freshmen chosen from Wuhan Polytechnic University in Wuhan,Hubei province.114 students,majoring in science & technology, and Class 1 and Class 2 participate in the investigation.Class 1 is the experimental class and Class 2,the control class.Before the experiment,the author will do two questionnaires to choose 20 students with higher foreign language classroom anxiety from each class.The foreign language classroom anxiety scale will be used(Horwits, 1986).The data of the inventory and the test will be collected and are then put into the computer with the software SPSS 11.5 for analysis.The questionnaire showed that it is quite possible for the students to receive learning online since they have an access to computers,and they have some ideas about the Internet.The results of the experiment showed:1) Foreign language classroom as an affective variable is negatively related with reading competence under the NBLT circumstance and under the traditional circumstance.2) The students' foreign language anxiety under the NBLT circumstance is relatively lower than that under traditional circumstance.This article also presents some suggestions on how to nurture student's reading competence under the network-based English teaching circumstances.3) Network-based English teaching exerted some effects on the improvement of college students' reading competence.The students' reading competence can be improved more or less under the network-based English teaching circumstances compared with that under the traditional English teaching circumstances.This article investigated and studied the effect of network-based English teaching on the development of the college students' reading competence by comparing the results of college students' reading competence under the network-based English teaching circumstances and under the traditional English teaching circumstances, based on the network-based language teaching theory.Besides,the differences of foreign language anxiety between the experimental class and the control class were explored.