An Empirical Study On The English Classroom Anxiety Of Junior Middle School Students

With the advent of humanistic psychology in the 1960s, the language teaching model had shifted from what and how the teacher should teach to how to make the learners learn more effectively. More and more language researchers and instructors have realized the importance of affective factors. As an important affective factor, anxiety possesses great effect on language learning. Researchers abroad started their studies of language anxiety from the 1970s. Typical representatives are Scovel, Horwitz, Young, etc.. By adopting various kinds of research methods, scholars have conducted numerous researches on foreign language anxiety. The domestic researches started relatively late and college students were usually chosen as subjects. Empirical studies aiming at English classroom anxiety of junior middle school students were rare.The present study focuses on studying the English classroom anxiety of junior middle school student. After analyzing the research data, the present study comes to the final conclusions that English classroom anxiety does exist among junior students. Besides, four dimensions of English classroom anxiety, namely, speech anxiety and fear of negative evaluation, lack of confidence, intolerance of ambiguity and negative attitude toward English class can be distinguished. However, there is no significant correlation between English classroom anxiety and students'English achievement, which is different from the previous results that anxiety has a negative correlation with language achievement. Among the four dimensions of English classroom anxiety, only lack of confidence is found to have significantly negative correlation with English achievement.After realizing the junior students are experiencing certain degrees of English classroom anxiety, we conclude some pedagogical implications for alleviating it. The teacher should promote students'confidence in the process of language learning. Besides, comprehensible input should be offered by the teacher according to the language level of the students. The teachers could also create favorable classroom atmosphere with the help of multimedia, thus helping the students to learning English more effectively.