The Effectiveness Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Reducing Foreign Language Anxiety Of Senior Middle School Students

Researches show that foreign language anxiety has negative effects on language learning in most cases.By contrast,metacognitive strategies are significant for the successful language learning.However,most of the studies on foreign language anxiety focus on how foreign language anxiety affects students' language performance and their language learning skills and the factors contributing to the students' foreign language anxiety,as for how to alleviate foreign language anxiety in China is less investigated. Some researches try to give some suggestions to reduce students' anxiety,but much effort has been taken to reduce foreign language anxiety from the perspective of learners' affective factors,such as establishing a pleasant classroom atmosphere,promoting students' positive feelings and motivation in learning and avoiding students' embarrassment in language class.However,the results and effects are not so desirable.So the present study tries to find out an efficient way to alleviate students' English learning anxiety through metacognitive strategy training.A survey was conducted to examine the correlation of foreign language anxiety and metacognitive strategy,in which 140 students randomly-selected from two classes in Grade one in Dengzhou No.2 Senior Middle School He Nan province participated. Besides,a case study was carried out to testify whether senior middle school students' foreign language anxiety could be reduced effectively by means of metacognitive strategy training.One of the two classes participated in the case study as the experiment class and multiple instruments were employed:questionnaires,diaries,discussion and interview. The major findings yielded from the present study can be summarized as follows:Firstly,most of the subjects in this study are suffering from foreign language anxiety at a high level.Secondly,the correlation between foreign learning anxiety and metacognitive strategies is significantly negative and there exists a significant difference among middle school learners of three anxiety levels in using metacognitive strategies. Finally,metacognitive strategy training contributes to reducing English learning anxiety. Besides,the training helps them arouse their awareness of metacognitive strategy use, improves their language learning strategy use and enables them to experience greater autonomy in English learning.It is an effective way to reduce middle school students' English learning anxiety.The implications for teachers and students are that they should acknowledge the existence of foreign language anxiety and pay special attention to foreign language anxiety and metacognitive strategies.The teachers should integrate metacognitive strategy training into English teaching to reduce middle school students' English anxiety,help them achieve learner autonomy and make their English learning more efficient.