Investigation Into Language Anxiety On The English Learners Of High School

In the history of educational research, much attention had been paid to the cognitive process of foreign language learning rather than to the emotional factors functioning during the course of learning until recently, in the 1970s, a number of researches were undertaken on the emotional elements in foreign language teaching and learning. Educator should try to reveal the nature of foreign language teaching and learning form both the cognitive aspect and the emotional aspect in order to explore a scientific, efficient way of foreign language teaching.Anxiety is a state of apprehension, uncertainty, and fear resulting from the anticipation of a realistic or fantasized threatening event or situation, often impairing physical and psychological functioning. Students often feel nervous or fearful; some becomes weary of learning, even drop out. Foreign language anxiety, as one variable of the most important emotional factors, is a combination of many kinds of negative emotional states. 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 starts by reviewing the previous and current research on anxiety both abroad and in China. On the basis of fruitful western research in language anxiety. I conducted a study on language anxiety of middle school students. The research methods I adopted in this study consisted of both quantitative and qualitative surveys. In the quantitative study. a foreign language anxiety scale (FLAC) designed by Horwitz (1986) was used to measure the anxiety level of senior middle school students. In the qualitative study, I interviewed students and English teachers so as to...