Effect Of College English Listening Strategies On Listening Anxiety

Anxiety exists extensively in the language learning and plays a vital role according to theWestern language teaching practice and academic prove. Anxiety produces enormousimpactions on language learning in many respects especially on listening and speaking. Thus,the study on listening anxiety is worthy to be discussed because it is one of the researches onthe individual difference in Second Language Acquisition. Foreign language listening strategyis an important microscopic research field of learning strategy. The previous studies haveshowed that the selection of different listening strategy can influence the learner’s listeninganxiety. Based on the literature review, we found that most of the current studies still stick onthe correlations between anxiety and language learning but failed to propose some effectivestrategies on reducing listening anxiety. Besides that, the subjects of the research are mainlyfocused on the college students from developed areas but few on the students fromunderdeveloped areas. This study focuses on the present situation of language anxiety and thecharacteristics of listening strategy and the influence of effective listening strategies onlistening anxiety of non-English major undergraduates in northwest A&F University. Furthermore, this study will also find out which listening strategies could reduce the listening anxietyso that the students could improve their listening and the teachers could modify their listeningteaching. Finally the study could provide authentic and reliable data for the further research.This study is aimed at answering following questions:1. what are the distributions andcharacteristics of listening anxiety of the non-English major undergraduates?2. Could thelistening strategies influence the listening anxiety?3. What are the distributions andcharacteristics of listening strategies of the non-English major undergraduates? Which kindof strategies could reduce the listening anxiety level? The study mainly adopts the quantitative and qualitative methods. In present study, theparticipants consist of186second-year undergraduates in the college of Animal Science andTechnology in Northwest A&F University. The quantitative materials are two self-reportedinventories: the Chinese version of Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale by Kim (2000)and the questionnaire of English Listening Learning strategies by Xu Haibo (2005). All thedata collected were done with factor analyses to examine the items related to listening anxietyas well as listening strategies by using the Statistical Packages for the Social Sciences (SPSS)for window version17.0. Then, each category of both listening anxiety and listeningstrategies is processed by descriptive analysis and correlation analysis to get an overview oftwo variables. Qualitative research method is mainly interview and the process is recordedwith Chinese and transcribed into text and then classify them finally.The findings from this empirical study are as follows:1. Most of students of the non-English major undergraduates in this universityexperience anxiety in the process of listening.69%of participants are in the level of mediumanxiety,14%of participants are in the level of high anxiety but low anxiety group onlyaccounts for17%.2. The overall tendencies of students’ listening strategies were cognitive strategy,metacognitive strategy and socio/affective strategy in declining order.3. The selection of the listening strategies has effects on the listening anxiety. The extentsof their influence were metacognitive strategy, cognitive strategy and socio/affective strategyin declining order.The results of the study have strong pedagogical implications on students who canreduce their listening anxiety to improve their listening as well as teachers who could modifytheir teaching.(1) Teachers are supposed to admit the existence of listening anxiety and knowthe causes of listening anxiety. Especially for some high anxious students, the teacher shouldhelp them to find their causes of listening anxiety combined with their situation;(2) Teachersshould not only teach the basic knowledge of language but also give the guidance to studentsof the effective strategies which could reduce the listening anxiety;(3) The students shouldconsciously cultivate and form a suitable language learning strategy system in order to reducelistening anxiety and improve their foreign language ability.