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. 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.Research on affective variables has attracted much attention in various parts of the world, but few studies have been carried out about the students' exact experiences of anxiety in EFL classroom in Chinese context. Much research is needed to investigate the effect of anxiety on high school students' EFL learning. With this purpose in mind, I have 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 results in 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 learning. 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 high proficient ones. Thirdly, a number of personal variables, such as gender, family background, self-esteem and personality can result...