On Anxiety Problems Of Juninor Middle School Students In English Listening Comprehension

In recent years, affect factors have been receiving more and more attention by L2 researchers, with anxiety being one of the most important components. Among basic skills of foreign language learning—listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening is put in the first place. But in my teaching, I find among most junior students show high-level anxiety in listening class, which affects them in improving their listening ability. This listening anxiety causes psychological passivity and tiredness, nervousness and panic. The present paper reports the findings of a survey on junior students' anxiety in English listening .As few people have done much on anxiety in listening comprehension of juniors in middle schools, I have made endeavor in studying anxiety.The subjects chosen for the study are 120 Junior Three students in Fenghuangshan Middle School of Xian'an, Xianning. The experiment began in September. 2006 and lasted for more than three months. It is a three stage experiment: pre-test, questionnaires, post-test and interview with 15 students in private. In light of FLCAS made by Horwitz in 1986, The paper I made adopts "English Listening Classroom and Test Anxiety Scale" to test the junior students' anxiety in English listening by means of questionnaires. Based on the answers to the questions, the paper comes to the conclusion that the junior students have pervasive English listening anxiety in English listening comprehension and also have facilitative anxiety and debilitative anxiety, that is to say. anxiety has both positive and negative effects on listening comprehension .To better the situation ,I conducted English listening teaching experiments, the purpose of which was to attempt new listening teaching techniques in light of listening comprehension and anxiety theories and teaching conditions in middle schools.By means of experiments and post-test, every junior English teacher should hold the belief that anxiety is inborn and commonly existent and that debilitative anxiety plays a negative role in listening. Teachers should adopt some teaching techniques and strategies to gradually improve English listening teaching and decrease students' English listening anxiety. With their efforts of creating a low-anxiety atmosphere in class, students' listening comprehension can improve. It is every teacher's responsibility to develop the students' capacity of language use in a comfortable atmosphere.The finding of the present study suggest that English teachers should consider the possibility students' poor performance while contriving to teach explicit listening strategies to help students to decrease anxiety and listen more effectively.