Academic Major, English Proficiency And Language Anxiety: From Socio-psychological And Affective Perspectives

In interpretations of the learner and learning, the affective factors that the learner brings to the learning task have received more and more emphasis. For anxiety is quite of the affective factors that most pervasively obstructs the foreign language learning, it attracts more and more academic concerns of language researchers and teachers.Researchers and English teachers in China now have imitated and taken advantage of the mature theories and achievements of language anxiety in foreign countries. And they have done a lot of empirical studies on language anxiety. However, most of them haven't paid too much attention to the specific Chinese context and the factors leading to language anxiety in some deep level.This thesis summarizes the previous and current researches in anxiety research and finds out what is still left to be probed into. Inspired by the fruitful researches on language anxiety, especially the well-developed social-educational model by Gardner (1985) and the influential"Affective filter Hypothesis"proposed by Krashen (1983), the authors then attempts to conduct an investigation on English language anxiety in the unique Chinese context, to figure out the correlation between academic major, English proficiency and language anxiety and then explore some strategies to reduce the debilitating language anxiety. The former theory integrates social and cultural variables into second language learning which gives the author a new angle to perceive the problem of language anxiety; while the latter one considers language anxiety as an important role in second language learning from the perspective of affection.This study adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods in designing the research. There were 223 students of non-English major in their second grade in Jiangxi Normal University selected for the study, including 109 students of social science and 114 of science; and among whom 12 students were chosen to be interviewed. The scale this study used was Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale. Scores of CET-4 were obtained to access students'English proficiency. All data were processed by Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 13.0.The findings of the present study indicate that there exist significant differences between social science and science students in language anxiety; science students are universally more anxious than social science students. And there also exist significant differences between high proficiency and low proficiency students in language anxiety; low proficiency students are commonly more anxious than high proficiency students. The study suggests that lack of English-speaking environment, teacher-centered classroom, introverted personality, overemphasis on examination and career expectancy under the unique Chinese context can be viewed as the potential sources causing language anxiety. Previous learning experience, curriculum arrangement, gender distribution and learning habits can be viewed as the social-psychological factors contributing to the differences in language anxiety between social science students and science students. Communication apprehension and fear of negative evaluation are the most anxiety-provoking factors for students'language anxiety, which can be illustrated as the block leading to the negative relationship between English proficiency and language anxiety.Several pedagogical strategies are offered according to the findings in this study, such as: 1) Constructing harmonious classroom environment, 2) Raising students'awareness of language anxiety, 3) Building up self-esteem, 4) Promoting cooperative learning, 5) Curriculum reform. There is huge space remaining for research on language anxiety in Chinese context and the present study is hoped to be a preliminary research who can take the responsibility of inspiration.