The Emotional Barriers Affecting Students Learning English Of Rural Junior High School-A Survey Of Anxiety

In the previous education, emotion was not important enough. Researchers and educators used to focus on the development of cognitive, but they neglected the importance of emotion in education, which led to students’ “Emotional illiteracy”. With the growth of humanistic psychology, researchers and educators began to pay attention to emotional factors in language learning. Students’ active emotion is good for language learning, while negative emotion will affect the results of language learning. Anxiety can lead to vicious circle: leading to tension, fear, wasting energy and attention. And it has a negative effect on language input and output.The study reviewed the development of emotion in foreign language teaching, and the author mainly made a close theoretical and empirical research into the emotional factor---anxiety. Through the research, the author revealed some emotional problems about anxiety in English learning, and analyzed the causes of the problems and then proposes some teaching strategies which can facilitate cultivating students’ positive emotions and improve the efficiency of English learning. The main findings of this investigation are as follows: there are serious emotional barriers among rural junior high students in English learning. The anxiety problems are quite serious to rural junior high students. There are four aspects of anxiety: English communication apprehension, worrying about negative evaluation, examination anxiety and classroom anxiety. The anxiety of low achievers is higher than high achievers, and the anxiety of different level students has a significant correlation in English communication apprehension, worrying about negative evaluation, examination anxiety and classroom anxiety. Boys’ anxiety is higher than girls’, and the anxiety of different gender has a significant correlation in English communication apprehension, worrying about negative evaluation. The anxiety of the students from senior grade is higher than the students from junior grade, and the anxiety of the different grades has a significant correlation in English communication apprehension, worrying about negative evaluation and examination anxiety.