The Effect Of Foreign Language Anxiety On Senior School Students And Its Solutions

Foreign language anxiety is a complex phenomenon that has been studied in many previous studies either qualitative or quantitative. However, little research has been conducted in foreign language anxiety involving students of China, especially senior school students whose English are at intermediate level and below. Hence this reality makes it a fertile field for the researchers .The present thesis is an attempt to find out an effective way to solve the affective problems, esp. anxiety, in learning a foreign language, using some basic theories on affective factors, so as to improve our English teaching.Based upon the study and investigation into western theories on language learning anxiety, mainly upon Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope's identification of three types of foreign language anxiety: 1) communication apprehension , 2) test anxiety, and 3) fear of negative evaluation. The present article is to investigate the perceived levels of anxiety experienced by randomly-selected sample of 30 senior school students in their English study. The study's main objective is to identify the factors that may contribute to anxiety of the students'point of view. The study addressed several questions such as: 1) How anxiety hinders language acquisition? 2) How anxiety manifested in the students? 3) Which factors do students believe contribute to anxiety? 4) Which factors do students believe may help to lessen anxiety?To address these questions, multi-method and qualitative and quantitative methodologies are applied. A questionnaire and interview are conducted. The questionnaire is distributed to a sample of 30students (10 male and 20 female) in PoYang No.1 senior school. The questionnaire consists of 3 parts: Part A concerns the subjects'personal details; Part B is The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale conducted by Horwitz et al.; Part C consists of 4 description that might happen in an EFL class. In addition, a face-to-face semi-structured interviews were uses with 10 students (6 female and 4 male).Data is analyzed by using both descriptive statistics and analytic statistics. It is found that anxiety is negatively and closely related to English achievements. Both the interviews and responses to the FLCAS questions reveals that 92% (28) of the sample of participants are considered as anxious learners with 43% (12) of them considered as highly anxious. The most anxiety that the students have is communication anxiety. High levels of anxiety is related to English achievements and it manifests in the following aspects: 1) Being sensitive to failure. 2) Much attention paid to self-esteem.The article also discusses the effects of language anxiety on language learning; its pedagogical implications and offers some constructive strategies to lessen Chinese students'language learning anxiety.