A Study Of The Effects Of Anxiety On English Listening Of Students In Polytechnic Colleges

Psychologically speaking, anxiety refers to the intense and enduring negative feeling caused by vague and dangerous stimuli from the outside as well as the unpleasant emotional experience involved, such as anticipation, vexation and fear. As early as the 1940s and 50s, anxiety became the focus of educational psychology in Western countries. The 1970s witnessed the development of second language acquisition research when the emphasis of research shifted from external factors of teaching and learning to internal factors of learners. Many researchers then paid attention to the study of foreign language anxiety (FLA), which is a complicated mental phenomenon specific to language learning and is defined as a distinct complex of apprehension arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process. The studies in the past three decades repeatedly confirmed that foreign language anxiety is one of the best predictors in accounting for individual differences in language learning success, and that it is proved to be one of the most essential and influential affective factors. These previous studies have reached consensus on the relationship between affective variables and foreign language learning, that is, there exist persistent negative correlations between foreign language anxiety and foreign language achievement, self-perceived proficiency and motivation.Although Chinese researchers have already realized the negative role that foreign language anxiety plays in English learning, relevant investigations are rather few. Through a survey of relevant research literature, we find that most studies have focused their attention on general foreign language anxiety, but language-skill specific anxiety such as listening anxiety has long been neglected. Therefore, based on the previous studies, this thesis sets out to focus on the study of English listening anxiety of vocational college students, to investigate the influence anxiety has on listening comprehension, further to discuss the potential sources of English listening anxiety and to suggest possible coping strategies.The present study adopts three instruments including teaching observation, questionnaires and group interview to conduct a survey on English listening anxiety with 150 college students from Qingdao Harbor Vocational and Technical College as its subjects.In the research, we find that anxiety is pervasive among vocational college students in listening class and test. There are also debilitating and facilitating anxieties in vocational college students'anxiety, that is to say, anxiety may exert a negative and positive effect on listening comprehension and debilitating anxiety does affect the college students'listening achievement. Based on the statistical analysis of the questionnaires and the feedback from the group interview, the study explores the potential sources of English listening anxiety and puts forward some coping strategies from various aspects such as learners'psychology, teaching techniques, etc, in a hope to create a low-anxiety classroom atmosphere, and help to improve students'listening performance and proficiency in a most favorable affective state.The findings of this study, we hope, will make certain contributions not only to the theoretical studies of second language acquisition, especially to the foreign language anxiety research, but also to the practices of listening skills.