The Effect Of Foreign Language Anxiety On Vocational School Students And Its Solutions

Foreign language anxiety is a crucial factor affecting foreign language (FL) learning and performance. However, little research has been conducted in foreign language anxiety involving students of Chinese, especially those vocational school students whose English is at intermediate level and below. In addition, the majority of previous studies approached this issue with quantitative analysis in China, resulting in a lack of in-depth, qualitative analysis of the role of foreign language anxiety. To fill these gaps, this exploratory study employed a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews as the main data collection method to investigate students' anxiety experiences in regular settings.Based upon the study and investigation into western theories on language learning anxiety, mainly upon Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope's identification of three types of foreign language anxiety: 1) communication apprehension, 2) test anxiety, and 3) fear of negative evaluation, the present article was to investigate the perceived levels of anxiety experienced by a randomly-selected sample of 30 foreign language (English) students in a regular college setting at the beginning of their semester. The study's main objective is to identify the factors that may contribute to anxiety of the students and those may reduce anxiety in learning a foreign language, from the students' point of view. The study addressed several questions such as: 1) Do students believe that anxiety hinders language acquisition? 2) Which factors do students believe contribute to anxiety? 3) How isanxiety manifested in the students? 4) Which factors do students believe may help to reduce anxiety?To address these questions, multimethod and qualitative methodology were applied. A questionnaire and an interview were conducted. The questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 30 students (10 male and 20 female) majoring English in Jiangxi College of Foreign Studies. The questionnaire was designed to evaluate the learners' levels of anxiety in a traditional English learning setting and the interview was to dig out the causes for anxiety. The questionnaire consists of 3 parts. Part A concern the subjects' personal details. Part B was Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale conducted by Horwitz et al. Part C consisted 4 descriptions that might happen in an EFL class. In addition, a face to face semi-structured interviews were used with 10 students (6 female and 4 male).Data was analyzed by using both descriptive statistics and analytic statistics. It is found that anxiety is negatively and closely related to English achievements. Both the interviews and the responses to the FLCAS questions revealed that 94%(28) of the sample of 30 participants would be considered anxious learners with 40% (12) of these considered highly anxious. The most anxiety that the students had is communication anxiety. High levels of anxiety is negatively related to English achievements, it is manifested in the following aspects: 1) Being sensitive to failure 2) Much attention paid to self-esteemThe article also discussed the effects of language anxiety on language learning, its pedagogical implications and offers some constructive strategies to reduce Chinese students' language learning anxiety.