An Empirical Study Of English Learning Anxiety Of Polytechnic College Learners

Together with the social development and further deepening of the market reform, as well as modernization and internationalization of higher education, more and more people pay much attention to English learning as a very important communication tool. For the social enterprises or higher education institutions, English learning shares more and more importance. In reality, excellent English competence has been a necessary condition for polytechnic college graduates to be admitted to an ideal occupation after successful and smooth graduation. However, due to the poor English foundation or laying particular stress on some subjects rather than English, polytechnic college graduates, more or less, have a certain English learning anxiety, which causes a great pressure and affects their English learning achievements. The factors like teaching staff’s qualifications, importance of English learning and the learners’ accomplishments and so on have caused their English learning anxiety, English learning boredom and psychological conflicts as well as other problems. However, English teaching problems of this kind of students have not been well solved, producing a lot of difficult problems for English teaching and learning. Regretfully, academic circles also do not pay enough attention to this issue.Recently, empirical researches on students’English learning anxiety, at home and abroad are increasing gradually. However, these researches mainly focus on English learning anxiety of general institutes of higher education, or of those poor economic areas. Literature review suggests that researches on polytechnic college learners’English learning anxiety are still rare. Therefore, this paper selects a particular part of polytechnic college learners at random as research subjects to investigate their English learning anxiety by questionnaire survey and interview, exploring their English learning anxiety and its influencing factors, with the aim to answer the following three questions:(1) What’s the overall situation of the English learning anxiety of polytechnic college students?(2) What factors influence English learning anxiety of polytechnic college students?(3) What’s the correlation between polytechnic college students’English learning anxiety and their English achievements?Based on Horwitz’s foreign language classroom anxiety scale and polytechnic college students as research subjects, this research randomly selected 100 polytechnic college students as research subjects. According to subjects’points in the questionnaire, the top and the last five subjects on the score list are to be interviewed. The results of the questionnaire survey and interview are as follows:(1) It is universally proved that the polytechnic college students are suffering different levels of English learning anxiety and have demonstrated a more and more serious tendency.(2) The factors that affect the English learning anxiety of polytechnic college students are various, such as the students’ own quality which needs to be improved, the social employment situation and the family expectation, including polytechnic college students’ personality or characteristics and their English foundation, English learning habits as well as current employment pressure which attributes to their English learning anxiety. Besides, the school hardware facilities are relatively backward and the renewal of multimedia English teaching idea is lagged behind, which cause the decreasing of English teaching and learning quality. And there exists one-sided pursuit of school-running benefit of large class teaching, and so on and so forth.(3) English learning anxiety has different degrees of negative impacts on polytechnic college students’ English learning skills and abilities, and the biggest influence is on the oral English.Based on the results of research questionnaire survey and interview, this paper puts forward suggestions that we cultivate English learning interests and make improvements of reducing English learning anxiety, shedding light on suggestions how to improve English teaching and learning and promote polytechnic college learners’ English level effectively.