An Investigation On English Learning Anxiety Of Senior Grade One Students And Its Countermeasures

In China, English learning of learners is mainly from the formal classroom teaching. However, the actual situation of English learning is not satisfying, especially the English learning of senior middle school students. English learning in senior classes is a special situation where anxiety can easily emerge. The anxiety arising from English classes directly affect the learners’ absorption of language input and their language output, thus impeding the process of English teaching and learning. In English classes, students tend to become nervous, which will result in their poor performances and thus produce the sense of failure, all leading to the degree of their anxiety. Worse still, the added anxiety, in turn, has a great effect on the efficiency of learning. So we may safely draw the conclusion that the anxiety in senior English classes is likely to be the cause as well as the result of poor performances of English learning.As far as the new students of senior grade one are concerned, the possibility of anxiety towards English learning among them is much higher than that of students in senior grade two or senior grade three. However, when referring to relevant information, the writer finds that the present studies on the anxiety in middle school English classes are not comprehensive and systematic, and empirical studies are not sufficient.Since the 1970 s, research interest in EFL has shifted from teacher’s teaching to students’ learning, and an increasing number of studies on language anxiety have been undertaken in China. From the perspectives of general education, educational psychology and metacognitive psychology, this paper investigates the impact of student’s classroom anxiety on their English learning. An adapted Foreign Language Anxiety Scale is used to measure the anxiety level of around 300 senior middle school students from three senior middle schools in Shang Qiu, to survey the relationship between their classroom anxiety and their English learning, and to analyze the characteristics of the distribution of anxiety scores in their English learning. The causes and influence of anxieties are analyzed as well. In order to reduce English classroom anxiety, improve teaching methods and raise the quality of classroom teaching, the following suggestions are put forward: Firstly, to make a good connection of language teaching between junior high school and senior high school and improve the confidence and interest of students in learning English; Secondly, to establish good relationships between teachers and students and create harmonious atmosphere in English classroom; Thirdly, to optimize the way of teachers’ classroom questioning and correctly understand and deal with the students’ language errors.