A Study Of Foreign Language Anxiety Of High School Students

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. Especially, the two sides of learning ---cognition and emotion are now separated from each other in high school English teaching in China. In the 1970s, a lot of research was undertaken on the emotional elements in foreign language teaching and learning. Educator should try to reveal the nature of emotional aspect in order to explore a scientific, efficient way of foreign language teaching.Anxiety is quite possibly the affective factor that most pervasively obstructs the learning process. It is associated with negative feelings such as uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension and tension. Students often 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. Therefore, the research on foreign language anxiety is of significance.However, the writer looked up the language teaching publications from the 1980s on, and discovered that the research on the foreign language anxiety in our country is very rare.So the author hopes to study further by investigating all the 242 students from the 6 classes in order to have foreign language anxiety in drawn more attention to.In this study, questionnaires, interviews, classroom observations, and document collection were applied as instruments. The results were as follows. First, the analysis of the questionnaires showed that the foreign language anxiety tendency of students of high school was quite obvious. The result corresponded to that of the previous studies, in which there was a significant negative correlation between foreign language anxiety level and English learning achievement. Second, through a combinational analysis of multiple data sources, we found the five sources of language anxiety and the five anxiety-provoking situations. Third, both teachers and students in this study thought that the balance of instructional languages helped lower foreign language anxiety. Finally, the study revealed that teaches'awareness of foreign language anxiety is insufficient.Based on the findings in this study, suggestions of reducing foreign language anxiety were given to teachers, students and parents. The implications of this exploratory study include encouraging teachers to enrich their awareness of foreign language anxiety, carefully dealing with anxiety-provoking situations, encouraging teachers'use of more comprehension input, encouraging students to share their anxiety experiences. Based on the findings and implications of this study, students, teachers, and parents can increase their awareness of foreign language anxiety.Accordingly, better ways of dealing with foreign language anxiety can be adopted, and an enjoyable and effective language-learning environment can therefore be developed.