Study On The Current Status And Development Proposals Of High School Students’ Oral English Anxiety

Since the nineteen seventies, with the focus of language teaching moving from "how to teach" to "how to learn", researchers have paid more attention to learner’s individual factors, which caused the difference of learning results. In2003, the Education Ministry issued Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standard (Experiment), from which we can see that emotional attitude is an important factor to influence students’ language learning and overall development. And foreign language anxiety, as a special situational anxiety, its influence on foreign language learning of senior high school students should not be overlooked. In order to promote the implementation of curriculum reform effectively, we need to study the psychological anxiety in English teaching, aim at the influence of anxiety on oral English, find out the cause of anxiety, and make some advice to improve oral English teaching.Foreign language anxiety is related to emotional state in the process of foreign language teaching specific conditions. Mental tension, fear, excessive depression reaction all belong to the anxiety reaction. Researchers in related fields both at home and abroad have studied on foreign language anxiety in-depth and extensively, and they have defined and classified foreign language anxiety scientifically according to the research results. However, the results of these researches on foreign language anxiety are not the same. Oral English teaching is affected by many factors, such as teaching method, education background, all these factors affect oral English teaching in different degrees, but neither of those factors were as important as the anxiety on oral English.The study, based on the inductive researches of related literature on Foreign Language Anxiety, such as Krashen’s input hypothesis language and affective filter hypothesis, Tobias Model, and Brown&Levinson’s Face theory aims to investigate145high-school juniors from two classes of Xinyang Senior High School, focusing on their speaking anxiety in English class and the causes of it. On the basis of FLCAS(foreign language classroom anxiety scale), this thesis has worked out a speaking anxiety scale as a researching reference, to probe into the speaking anxiety of senior high school students with the help of SPSS tool. We not only measure the overall level of high school students’ foreign language anxiety, but also discuss the relationship between foreign language anxiety and oral performance. On the basis of this, the researchers attempt to explore the main reason for high school students’foreign language anxiety through observation, interviews and other qualitative research methods.This thesis consists of six chapters, which are listed as follows:the first chapter briefly describes the significance and background of the research. The second chapter focuses on the definition, classification, measurement of anxiety, anxiety in foreign language learning, and further researches on the relationship between foreign language anxiety and oral English. The third chapter is literature review on the research of Foreign Language Anxiety and speaking anxiety. It states the theoretical basis of this thesis. It investigates the speaking anxiety of senior high school students through questionnaire and the interview. The fifth chapter analyzes and discusses the data of the questionnaire and the interview, and draws a conclusion of the study. It also provides relevant strategies according to the anxiety problems. The sixth chapter is the conclusion part of the thesis, it initiates with the survey samples, analyzing tools and research results of the study, to reflect on its weakness and areas for future improvement and further exploration.The results indicate that, compared with the students from the urban class, the students from rural class show a relatively higher level of foreign language anxiety; there is no obvious difference in foreign language anxiety concerning gender in both classes; there is significant negative correlation between foreign language anxiety and students’ oral scores in both classes; no matter what the foreign language anxiety level is, it has no positive influence on oral performance. The higher the anxiety level is, the greater the negative influence is on oral performance. It is also discovered that factors like communication with foreigners, teaching methods, language competence and assessment methods may contribute a lot to anxiety in oral performance.According to the results, implication of the findings is discussed and anxiety-reduction measures are formulated:teachers should build harmonious relationship between teachers and students; teachers should strengthen the cultivation of students’ self-confidence and pay attention to the way of correcting students’ mistakes; teachers should properly arrange collaborative learning for the students so as to improve students’ ability of English speaking.