A Study Of Language Learning Anxiety Among Junior Middle School Students And Measures To Reduce High Anxiety

In recent years, English learning has attracted more and more attention of many researchers and teachers in China. For a long time, Chinese EFL teaching has been following the model of "teacher-centeredness" for certain reasons. This teaching model emphasizes the cognitive aspect, but ignores the affective factors. That is, students, as subjects of learning, used to be neglected. So "emotional illiteracy" is a common phenomenon in our foreign language teaching and learning. This is very harmful to language learning and students' all-round development.In the 1960s, Humanism came into being. The late 20^th century witnessed an important shift of focus of EFL teaching, that is, from the teacher to the learner. There has been an increasing interest among researchers in the role of affective factors in English learning, esp. those negative emotions that may result in negative effects to the students' learning, such as: anxiety, fear, shyness, nervousness, anger and hatred, all of which are assumed to influence the individual learners greatly. Among them, anxiety is generally acknowledged to be the most important one that obstructs middle school students from learning English well.There have been many studies investigating learners' affective factors in our country, yet little research has been focused on the effect of language anxiety in EFL teaching and learning, especially for middle school students. Generally speaking, middle school students are more self-conscious than children and pay more attention to others' response or attitudes towards their behavior. Thus it is more likely for language anxiety to occur in their language learning. This kind of affection will hinder language learning very seriously.As English teachers, if we are concerned with students' affect, we can make language teaching more affective and efficient. In this sense, it is necessary and urgent for us to know about the effect of anxiety in our classroom. We should try to create a kind of comfortable classroom atmosphere and help parents understand their children better by using all kinds of means. The present study explores middle school students' anxiety on English learning and offers several proposals on reducing anxiety.