The Impact Of FLA On Rural Middle School Students And Its Corresponding Strategies

With the focus of Second Language Acquisition research shifting to individual differences, factors concerning learners'personality and affections have become a center in the field of English instruction, among which anxiety ranks the first to be in great impact. Foreign researchers carried out a lot of studies for the purpose of investigating the relationship between anxiety and language learning. The research above laid a mature theoretical foundation in this field though many of them ended with different conclusions. And in China, scholars, gradually realizing the great implications of anxiety to foreign language learning and teaching, committed studies of anxiety on the basis of anxiety theories in the west. These studies have made a contribution to improving anxiety theories and promoting English teaching in China. However, these studies mostly choose adults or college students as the main body of their subjects, ignoring the language anxiety problem existing in the large population of junior middle school students, especially those living in rural areas.For these reasons, the researcher wanted to conduct a thorough investigation into the middle school students in Bashang areas of Zhangjiakou District based on previous researches home and abroad. Through the investigation, the researcher desired to know the students'anxiety level, analyze the common sources of their anxiety and other anxiety provoking situations, and take active steps to overcome or reduce the foreign language anxiety. The researcher, benefited from a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, first conducted a survey using Horwitz's (1986) FLCAS among the 129 middle school students from a middle school in the Bashang areas of Zhangjiakou District, aiming at the various sources of anxiety and its relations to such factors as sex, achievement, residential area, etc. Second, a follow-up interview was conducted to obtain a subjective description of the interviewee's own experience in English learning process and other sources provoking their anxious reactions in and outside the classroom, and lay a foundation for the pedagogical suggestions on the measures to reduce anxiety. The interviewees are some students who get either higher or lower anxiety scores on the questionnaire.This study showed that there exists a higher level of foreign language anxiety among the middle school students in rural areas of China, and foreign language anxiety and academic performance was negatively correlated. When residential area is concerned, students from villages suffer a much higher anxiety than those from towns. To solve the above problems, the researcher pointed out a few suggestions based on her teaching experience and the truths about students: First of all, teachers should be careful when facing anxiety-evoking situations. Secondly, teachers should strive to create a more pleasant and relaxed environment for learning English and help students to build their confidence. Finally, teachers should respect the principles of quality education, adjust the teaching content rationally, and try to reduce students'test anxiety.In short, this thesis aims at applying the new research results to English teaching so as to help students alleviate language anxiety and improve their English proficiency.