The Effects Of Language Anxiety On English Vocabulary Memory Among English Major Students

The study was carried out through the combination of the quantitative and qualitative research methods which began with the hypotheses based on the effects of foreign language anxiety on vocabulary memory.The two hypotheses were: (1) High level of anxiety correlated negatively with English vocabulary memory; (2) Low level of anxiety correlated positively with English vocabulary memory. The quantitative research could be divided into two parts: questionnaires and classroom experiments. The 60 subjects were freshmen from Qingdao University of Science and Technology and majoring in English. Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) developed by Horwitz and Cope (1986) was translated into Chinese and administrated to test the subjects. Classroom experiment aimed to test the memory situations through presenting the subjects with different emotional associations, such as positive association, normal association and low anxiety association. In the qualitative research, the author selected 5 subjects from the high, medium, and low anxiety group respectively, and interviewed them.The author adopted SPSS to carry out descriptive analysis, one-way analysis of variance, and correlate analysis, and finally drawn conclusions as followed: (1) The anxiety means revealed that English major students'anxiety scores were higher than the students of other majors in this study; (2) High level anxiety correlated negatively with English vocabulary memory; (3) Low level anxiety correlated positively with English vocabulary memory, it could facilitate both short term and long term memory.The author proposed that more attention should be given to the language anxiety of English major students, reduced the negative effects of anxiety, and made use of the language anxiety properly.