Research On Foreign Language Anxiety Of Non-english-major College Students

With the increasing concern and research about the affective variables in foreign language learning, anxiety has become one of the hot issues discussed by linguists and researchers. Anxiety is regarded as one of the most crucial affective variables, and foreign language anxiety is a kind of complicated mental phenomenon specific to language learning.Researchers home and abroad have conducted studies on anxiety and foreign language classroom anxiety. They have discovered that among the emotional problems anxiety is most remarkable, unique and distinct from others. Foreign language anxiety is "a salient self-awareness, belief and sentiment connected with classroom language learning, which occurs during the learning process. "(Horwitz.1991). Some experiments show that almost one half of the language students have suffered anxiety, and most of the researchers agree that foreign language anxiety is negatively correlated with foreign language achievement.Most of the previous researches concerned about graduates, English-major undergraduates or non-English majors in prestigious colleges and universities. Few paid attention to non-English majors in Chinese provincial colleges and universities, which justifies this thesis.The participants in this thesis are 124 sophomores studying science courses in Hebei University of engineering, Handan, Hebei Province. Almost 85% of them come from the rural area. They enter college with low English scores and difficulty in learning English. The study includes both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The software SPSS 13.0 and Microsoft Excel are used for the data analysis. The researcher adopts Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) developed by Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986) as the questionnaire to measure the level of foreign language anxiety that students underwent in her classes. The thesis is to investigate the following questions.1) To what degree do the science students in provincial colleges experience English classroom anxiety? 2) Is there correlation between the learners' anxiety level and foreign language achievement? If so, are they positively correlated or negatively correlated with each other? 3) How are the three aspects of English classroom anxiety (communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation) distributed?? 4) Is there any gender difference as for foreign language anxiety? The results show that, firstly, English classroom anxiety does exist among the non-English majors in provincial colleges, but it is not as serious as the previous researches stated. Secondly, there is a mild positive correlation between anxiety and students'foreign language achievement, which is opposite to most of the researches. Thirdly, among the three aspects of English classroom anxiety, fear of negative evaluation ranked highest. Fourthly, there is no connection between anxiety and gender.The present study may provide useful insight as to understanding the English classroom anxiety of Chinese college students:the thesis proves that in contrast to the students in best colleges, those in provincial colleges have less serious anxiety, which expands the research field of foreign language anxiety; meanwhile anxiety's facilitating function suggests that in foreign language teaching, language teachers should actively guide students' anxiety instead of getting rid of it as a barrier to language learning.