An Investigation Of Students' English Learning Anxiety In Chinese Senior Middle Schools

With the advent of humanistic psychology, foreign language educators and researchers abroad have been paying attention to learners' 'affective variables' in language learning since the 1960s. It is realized that neither the cognitive nor the affective has the last word, and each cannot be separated from the other. Only when they interact simultaneously in the process of language learning can the students develop their ability better. Therefore, the focus of second language acquisition has shifted from the way that teachers teach to the way that learners learn during the 1970s. In his 'Affective Filter Hypothesis', Krashen states that learners are distracted by affective factors in language learning process. Acquirers with a low affective filter, high motivation, self-confidence, and low anxiety, seek and receive more input. A large number of studies show that a variety of affective variables are interconnected. Of all these factors, language anxiety is possibly the most pervasive obstruction in second/foreign language learning.In general, anxiety is defined as 'a state of uneasiness and apprehension caused by the anticipation of something threatening'. Foreign Language Learning (FLL) is a specific situation, which is filled with ego-threats and is prone to cause anxiety. The nervous and fearful psychology of Chinese senior middle school students in FLL is extraordinarily serious. For example, they never volunteer to answer the teachers' questions and it is very difficult to ask them to discuss freely. Some students are upset, shaking and sweating during the examinations. Also, high school students in adolescence are very afraid of losing faces in public if they make mistakes so they would rather keep silent, which leads to low efficiency. However, affective variables have not attracted much attention in Chinese EFL teaching and few studies have been carried out about the students' exact experiences of anxiety in EFL classroom. Much research is needed to investigate the effect of anxiety on high school students' EFL learning. It is owing to these factors that I made a study of the senior middle students' language anxiety. The research mainly focuses on four aspects, including students' different levels of anxiety in EFL classroom, the relationship between language anxiety and outcomes, potential sources of anxiety, and the strategies to reduce language anxiety.The thesis, first of all, reviews the previous and current research on anxiety, and finds out what is still left to be done. Inspired by the fruitful Western research resultsin language anxiety, I adopted both quantitative and qualitative surveys. In the quantitative study, A Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (FLAC) designed by Horwitz (1986) is used to measure the anxiety level of senior middle school students; in the qualitative study, casual talks with students and English teachers are made use of so as to provide supplementary data to the results from the quantitative study.The results show that, in general, students are more or less interfered with language anxiety. To be more specific, almost half of the senior middle school students are highly anxious and only a small number of students are lowly anxious. Besides, there is negative correlation between outcomes and anxiety. That is, the students with high English marks are less anxious while low proficient students are generally more anxious than the proficient ones. Thirdly, a number of personal variables, such as gender, family background, self-esteem and personality can result in the different anxiety levels among the students. Finally, through open-ended questions and interviews, and by taking into consideration several factors such as Chinese culture, the circumstance of English teaching in senior middle schools, the researcher found two dominating anxiety-generating factors: the learners' internal factors and the external ones. Internal factors include the learners' character, self-esteem, risk-taking and the tolerance of ambiguity, unscientific beliefs about language learning while external factors exi...