A Study On The Relationship Among Non-English Majors’English Learning Motivation, Learning Anxiety And Learning Achievements

For a long time, people’s knowledge about English learning is only confined to the cognitive level, and few education researchers care about the students’ affective state. With the constant development of this field, people find gradually that the learners’affective state, such as confidence, motivation, anxiety and so on may more or less influence the learning results. Then, the studies about these affective factors spring up. This paper chooses two of the affective factors, anxiety and motivation, as the research topic.In order to explore the relationship among the two affective factors---learning motivation, learning anxiety---and the academic performance, this paper mainly adopts the quantitative study, and the qualitative study acts as the supplementary role. The subjects of the study are177students coming from7different majors in a University. The questionnaire used in the quantitative study is adapted from Horwitz (1986)’s FLCAS and the domestic scholar Gao Yihong (2003)’s University Students’English Learning Motivation Investigation Scale. The standard to measure the academic performance is the scores of the CET-4in Dec.2012. After analyzing the data of the questionnaire with the help of the SPSS.16.0, the author chose4students as the subjects for interview.The results of the study show that on the whole, the students have medium-level English learning anxiety and a-little-above-medium-level English learning motivation. Both the students’ English learning anxiety and the five English learning anxiety variables have significant negative correlation with the scores of the CET-4. The students’ English learning anxiety has significant positive correlation with the English academic performance motivation variable. And there is no significant correlation between students’ learning motivation and the scores of the CET-4, while there is negative correlation between the English academic performance motivation variable and the scores of the CET-4.The findings of the interview are that three students believe there is negative correlation between learning anxiety and the academic performance motivation. At the same time, all the four students give some suggestions about what the teachers can do to help them reduce their anxiety in study. The main English learning motivation of the four students is the academic performance motivation, and they think this kind of motivation sometimes will restrain their academic performance. The results of the interview above give part of the explanation of the results in the data analysis.After getting and analyzing the results of the questionnaire and interview, this paper provides some pedagogical implications to help the teachers and students achieve better learning results, such as giving students’love and respect, creating a relaxing classroom environment for students, giving students’ positive feedbacks and so on.In conclusion, there are subtle correlations among English learning anxiety, English learning motivation, and the academic performance. Only when the teachers understand these correlations can they adopt appropriate teaching methods to help the students achieve better learning results.