A Study On Foreign Language Learning Anxiety And Countermeasures Of Rural Senior High School Students

Foreign language learning, in addition to its own characteristics, is also influenced by many subjective and objective factors. The language learning anxiety, as one of the affective factors, has negative influence on foreign language learning. In the past few decades, many linguists and scholars, whether in practice or in theory, have done a lot of researches and applied it into English teaching. However, the research on the relationship between the rural high school students’ anxiety index and their English achievement is still not deep, which provides researchers with a wide research area.For the purpose of investigating the causes of the foreign language learning anxiety among rural middle school students and putting forward to some specific countermeasures to reduce their foreign language anxiety, in this paper, the author adopts the questionnaire and interview to analyze the rural middle school students’ foreign language anxiety status through a random survey study of rural middle school students for the following research questions:(1) what is the degree of rural middle school students’ English learning anxiety?(2) How is English learning anxiety correlated with students’ achievements?(3) What are the causes of students’ foreign language learning anxiety?The research subjects are 180 high school students in a rural middle school in Hohhot City, the capital city of Inner Mongolia, which are mostly between ages of 17 to 19 years old, coming from Grade one, Grade two and Grade three of senior high school with two classes in each grade. Questionnaires and interviews will be employed in this paper. The questionnaire consists of two parts. The first part is the basic information of the research subjects including their name, class and their academic achievements in the past three final examinations. The second part is the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale designed by Horwtiz,which has been proved to be a highly reliable instrument. The interview mainly includes three questions:(1) what makes you anxious when you are learning English or having English class?(2) What is the reason for your being difficult to be relaxed in the English classroom?(3) In order to be able to be relaxed in the English classroom, I’d like to give my English teacher the following advice... After collecting the questionnaires, the writer used the tools Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and the SPSS 17.0 for Windows to calculate and analyze the data.The result of the survey study shows that the degree of the communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation are higher than the average level of anxiety on theory. In the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale, except for the subjects fearing the fast pace of English class, the rest of the majority of anxiety are lower than the moderate degree of anxiety. Moreover, there is a negative correlation between the teacher-student relationship and English classroom anxiety of senior high school students. And the better the leaner’s achievement is, the lower their language learning anxiety is. After analyzing the data, several methods can be derived to reduce students’ foreign language learning anxiety from the angel of teachers and students themselves. Firstly, the language teachers should optimize questioning strategy. Secondly, English teaching should play the Role of Meaning Negotiation through the way of inspection, verification, confirmation checks, clarification and repetition. Thirdly, a harmonious environment is always important for students learning English. The first strategy for students to adopt is to set up correct views of language learning. What’s more, students should recognize their own foreign language learning anxiety. The last but not the least, the students should change their original attitude to exam-oriented education.Those proposals are mainly based on the causes of foreign language learning anxiety surveyed in this study. But the result of the research cannot reflect the current foreign language learning anxiety status of all rural high school students.