An Investigation Of English Learning Anxiety Among English Major Graduates

As an important affective factor, anxiety plays a significant role in languagelearning. Most of the previous studies center on middle school students ornon-English major undergraduates. The present research is conducted on124Englishmajor graduates from Nanchang University and Jiangxi Normal University. Itexplores the influence of English learning anxiety on English major graduates. Thepurpose of the study is to help the teachers and the English major graduatesthemselves to cope with high anxiety and to improve the efficiency of teaching andlearning. This research discusses mainly three research questions:(1) Do the Englishmajor graduates feel anxious about English learning? What are the differences inlevels of their anxiety?(2) What are the relationships between English learninganxiety and individual variables as personality, English proficiency and academiccompetence?(3) What are the possible sources of their English learning anxiety?The present research adopts both quantitative and qualitative approach to collectdata. The quantitative research focus on a questionnaire revised on the basis ofHorwitz et al.’s (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS). Thequantitative data were put into SPSS for descriptive analysis. Then ninerepresentative participants were selected from124subjects for interviews accordingto the statistic results. The qualitative data is to compensate and verify thequantitative results.Major findings are found out. Firstly, English major graduates do experienceanxiety in English learning and most of them belong to moderate anxiety, whichfacilitates language learning best; secondly, academic anxiety exerts the mostinfluence on the English major graduates, next are communication apprehension andfear of negative evaluation, and general anxiety the least; thirdly, English learninganxiety negatively correlate with academic anxiety, but there is no significantcorrelation with personality and English proficiency; fourthly, intrapersonal-based, interpersonal-based and skill-based factors contribute to English major graduatesanxiety, wherein intrapersonal-based anxiety mainly manifested in falseself-evaluation and fear of failure, interpersonal-based anxiety manifested incompetitiveness and distant teacher-student relationship, and skill-based anxietycenters on reading, writing academic papers and searching for useful information.Finally, the present study discussed the research findings and put forward somepedagogical implications of alleviating English learning anxiety, that is, establishingconfidence is essential to overcome high anxiety; nurturing scientific learning beliefs,including treating error and competitiveness properly; necessary support and helpfrom teachers; enhancing teacher-student interactions and taking specific measures todeal with high anxiety of language learning.