A Survey Of English Classroom Anxiety Of Students Majoring In Arts

One interesting question in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) is why some learners successfully learn a second language while other learners do not. Several reasons have been posited for this, including individual factors such as cognitive abilities, personality characteristics, aptitude, and affective factors. Ellis (1994) proposes a framework to the study of individual differences, and he thinks learners' affective factors are included in it as a key element which will affect language learning outcomes. Krashen's affective filter hypothesis suggests that learners are distracted by affective factors in SLA, while foreign language anxiety is one of the most important affective variables in it. Generally speaking, anxiety is defined as a state of uneasiness and apprehension caused by the anticipation of something threatening. Foreign language learning is a specific situation, which is full of ego-threats that are likely to cause anxiety. Anxiety is probably one of the most pervasive affective variables that impede language learning. Foreign language learning is particularly anxiety-provoking. Therefore, the study on foreign language anxiety is of great significance to the improvement of language learners' performance.Students majoring in arts are a special group. Special major and characteristics determine their different learning features and different needs. Generally speaking, art students have poor basic English knowledge, which is caused by many factors. Among these factors, anxiety stands out as one of the main blocking affective factors for students' effective English learning. The nervousness and fear suffered by art students in English learning are much serious. For example, many of them seldom volunteer to answer teachers' questions in English class and it is hard to ask them to discuss freely. Some students are upset, shaking and sweating during examinations. Unfortunately, art students' English learning anxiety has not attracted much attention in China and few studies have been carried out about the art students' real experiences of anxiety in foreign language classroom. Therefore, much more researches are needed to investigate the effect of anxiety on art majors' English learning. Because of these reasons, the present author makes a study on art students' English classroom anxiety. The study mainly focuses on the following aspects: students' different levels of anxiety experienced by art students in English learning classroom, the influence of gender on anxiety, the relationship between language learning anxiety and achievements and the strategies to alleviate art students' English learning anxiety by comparative study of the different anxiety levels between art students and non-art students,The research in this paper is conducted on the basis of questionnaire. The participants in this study are 172 freshmen (80 art majors and 92 non-art majors) at Shandong University at Weihai. The questionnaire is based on Horwitz et al's Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) (1986), supplemented by open survey questions in order to better understanding their English language classroom anxiety level. In view of classification of FLCAS by Horwitz et al's, the author classifies it into four components: communication apprehension, test anxiety, fear of negative evaluation and general anxiety. Data is analyzed on these four components with the aid of SPSS.Through several levels of analysis and comparison, the author finds that there does exist a certain level of foreign language anxiety among the art majors. The situation of English learning anxiety of art majors sampled at Shandong University at Weihai is following: the mean anxiety score of 80 students is 103, which is higher than that of 92 non-art students' mean score which is 95.65. It is quite apparent that the art students' total levels of English language classroom anxiety are relatively high, besides, what can be drawn is that speaking is the most anxiety-producing factor among all; there is significant difference of foreign language anxiety between genders and male students exhibit stronger language anxiety than female ones; and there exists a negative correlation between language achievements and anxiety, indicating that the higher the students' level of foreign language anxiety, the more likely they are to receive lower grades.As far as the results of the present study are concerned, some ways of decreasing art students' language learning anxiety are suggested. The data in this thesis may be helpful to researchers and teachers of English to become aware of the negative role that anxiety plays in English learning. Furthermore, by identifying the art students' anxiety level and recognizing the potential sources, teachers can help them find out some countermeasures to reduce anxiety and then obtain good learning efficiency.