A Study On The Anxiety Of Senior High School Underachievers In English Learning

Since the1960s, with the development of humanistic psychology, foreignlanguage educators and scholars have started to become increasingly interested in theaffective factors. As one of the most important affective variables, foreign languagelearning anxiety plays an important role in students’ foreign language learning. As aspecial group, High school English underachievers’ English learning process is likelyto experience a unique language learning anxiety phenomenon.Researches on foreign language anxiety started in the1940s. However, not untilthe1980s did researches on the foreign language anxiety make great breakthrough.Since then, many researchers both abroad and at home have conducted enormousresearches on this phenomenon. However, most of the previous studies were done inthe western culture settings. The subjects were mainly college students, overseastudents or adults. The fact is that researches on high school English underachieversare extremely rare. Based on the theory and the previous studies about foreignlanguage learning anxiety, this thesis mainly investigates the present situation of thehigh school English underachievers’ foreign language learning anxiety. The researchquestions are as follows:(1) What is the overall status of high school underachievers’ Englishlearning anxiety? Based on the high school underachievers’ Englishlearning anxiety overall status, the thesis will further analyze thespecific anxiety of high school underachievers and find out which kindof foreign language anxiety is the most prominent.(2) What are the sources of high school underachievers’ English learninganxiety?(3) Is there any correlation between English learning anxiety andachievement? If yes, positive or negative?This thesis selects60high school English underachievers as subjects. Questionnaire and interview are mainly used in this thesis. The questionnaire isadapted from Horwitz’s Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS).The questionnaire is used to analyze the overall present status and the causes ofhigh school underachievers’ English learning anxiety. In order to find out thedeep sources of high school underachievers’ English learning anxiety, the authorinterviewed20high school English underachievers. The interviewees give somesuggestions on how to alleviate the English learning anxiety. After analyzing thequestionnaires and interviews, this thesis eventually comes to the followingconclusions:Most of the high school English underachieves suffer from high level ofEnglish learning anxiety. Among all the anxieties that the English underachieverssuffer, the level of test anxiety was the highest, and followed by fear of negativeevaluation and communicative fear, which was different the previous study. Theprevious study showed that the level of fear of negative evaluation was thehighest. Through data analysis, the high school English underachieves’ Englishlearning anxiety and the academic achievement is negatively correlated, that is,the higher the level of anxiety, the lower the grade is. This is consistent with theprevious findings. Through analysis of the questionnaire and the interviewresults, the sources of high school underachievers’ English learning anxiety arefound. Self-evaluation, English proficiency, English ambiguity tolerance,examination, English classroom activities and teaching methods can lead to highschool English underachievers’ English learning anxiety. Based on the sources,the author puts forward some suggestions on how to alleviate the high schoolunderachievers’ English learning anxiety.