Investigation Of The Correlation Between Foreign Language Anxieties And Individual Anxiety Patterns Of Two Primary School Students In Beijing

Emotional education has become a trend in the educational field since 1960s. As one of its most important factors, anxiety has been paid more and more attention by researchers. The research on foreign language anxiety is of no exception on this point. The negative correlation between language anxiety and final course grade is certified. Those researches focus on adults and high school students, but very few related researches were set on primary school students, especially on the correlation between foreign language anxieties and individual anxiety patterns.The present study is undertaken to reveal language anxiety with a main focus on young children in two elementary schools. The research questions are presented as follows:(1) What is the degree of foreign language classroom anxiety on primary school students? What is the difference between students in key and ordinary primary schools? (2) About the four different types of anxieties from the revised questionnaire, which pattern is significantly correlated to the degree of foreign classroom anxiety? How to reduce the anxiety by controlling the patterns? (3) What's the significant difference between gender and years of learning English in language anxiety about primary school students? Why?From the quantitative and qualitative study, the author elicits the results: both the ordinary school students and the key school students have low level of foreign language classroom anxiety. Students in key primary school take a larger proportion in low level anxiety than students in ordinary primary school. The degree of foreign language classroom anxiety has a significant correlation between the total communication apprehension, the total self-confidence anxiety and the total intolerance of uncertainty anxiety. In addition, there is no significant difference in students'language anxiety except total self-confident anxiety between male students and female students. Furthermore, years of learning English is another factor which leads to the significant differences of the total negative evaluation. While there is no significant difference in other patterns of anxiety is proved. To reduce language anxiety in foreign language classroom, the primary school teachers firstly should encourage students and create a relaxing environment to let students feel comfortable to speak. Meanwhile we suggest teachers speak slowly and use comprehensible input to aid retention; teachers are asked to use whole-class activities to make students feel less anxious.