On Senior One Students' English Learning Anxiety And The Factors For It

Language teaching and learning is a process influenced by many factors. Emotions are not extra, they are the very center of human mental life. Positive emotions help to create good mentality for students when they are learning a foreign language, while negative emotions usually exert influence on students. The relationship between affect and language learning is a bi-directional one. Attention to affect can improve language teaching and learning. Anxiety, which is considered to be affective factors that most pervasively obstructs the foreign language learning process, in an environment where learners feel anxiety or insecure, they are likely to be psychological barriers to communication, also, if anxiety rises above a certain level, it is an obstacle to the learning process. When anxiety is present in the classroom, there is a down-spiraling effect. Anxiety makes us nervous and afraid and thus contributes to poor performance; this in turn creates more anxiety and even worse connected to the cognitive side of anxiety, which is worry. Worry wastes energy that should be used for memory and processing on a type of thinking which in no way facilitates the task at hand. Although it is a major obstacle to language learning, anxiety can be reduced. By the end of the 1980s, scholars have noticed the influence of anxiety on the foreign language learning, and have done some researches on it. For example, Spielberger states that 20% of the students dropped out of school because of the typical over anxiety in their learning, while among the lower anxious students only 6% of the students dropped out of school. Many of the scholars find the relation between the language learning anxiety and the learning achievement is negative correlation. Some researchers divide anxiety into three kinds: trait anxiety, state anxiety situation-specific anxiety. The latter two kinds of anxiety are usually aroused by the special state or situation. They are temporary anxiety. They can be controlled. The factors that correlated are very complex. They may change with different learning environment and learners and other factors. The research investigated the anxiety degree in Senior One English classroom by using Horwitz'FLCAS questionnaire. The aim of it is to make teacher have a clear idea about the English learning anxiety in Senior One class. In writer's opinion, the anxiety in this period is only a state or situation-specific. It can becontrolled by taking some measures, and to make the Senior English teaching more efficiently. The thesis consists of seven parts. Part one is an introduction of the aim, the method and the significance of the research. Part two is the literature review. It shows the definition, the kinds of the anxiety, the studies on anxiety home and abroad. Part three is about the methodology used to do the research, the subject, the tool and instrument used in the research. Part four is the finding and discussion. The data analysis shows that there is an over anxiety in Senior One English classroom learning. From the analysis of the interview and another questionnaire, writer finds some factors that correlated to this period anxiety. Part five is about some advice on controlling this period anxiety. Part six is the conclusion of the research. Part seven is the limitation and further study of the research. The sample in the study is not large enough. With limitation of the time, writer needs to do more research to draw a more scientific conclusion in her latter teaching and research.