A Study On The Correlation Between Foreign Language Anxiety And Oral Performance Of Chinese College EFL Learners

In recent years, research on second language acquisition (SLA) has switched from teacher-based to students-based and paid much attention to affective factors that influence second language acquisition. Among the various affective factors, anxiety is taken as an important factor that influences foreign language learning a lot. So the present research is to investigate the characteristics and sources of foreign language anxiety, identify the correlation between oral fluency and the feeling of anxiety as well as the correlation between foreign language anxiety and the use of formulaic language, and explore possible ways to reduce the feeling of anxiety while speaking.The thesis aims at exploring the correlation between foreign language anxiety and oral performance. The participants are 120 second year non-English majors in a college in Sichuan province. Research methods including interview, oral presentation and questionnaire are adopted. Firstly, the answers from 120 questionnaires were collected, classified and analyzed to identify characteristics and sources of foreign language anxiety. It is found that almost all the participants acknowledged that they might feel nervous when speaking English and the causes of anxiety include the negative evaluation from teachers and peers, the lack of linguistic and cultural knowledge and so on. Then the recorded material of oral presentation from 30 students were transcribed and collected. With the help of SPSS 13.0, the descriptive statistic analysis and Pearson correlation analysis were conducted to identify the correlation between oral fluency and the feeling of anxiety as well as the correlation between foreign language anxiety and the use of formulaic language. The results indicated that foreign language anxiety is negatively correlated with oral fluency and the use of formulaic language. Finally, the recorded interviews from the 30 participants were also transcribed and classified to explore possible ways to reduce the feeling of anxiety while speaking. On the basis of the above findings, implications for language teaching are provided. At last, limitations of the present research are listed and suggestions for future research are provided.