An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of Metacognitive Strategies On Non-english Majors' Oral English Anxiety

As an output-based skill, oral English plays an important role in language communication. According to the latest College English Curriculum Requirements(2007), the objective of college English is to develop students' ability to use English in a comprehensive way, especially in listening and speaking. However, oral English is one of the most difficult language skills for many Chinese students. The author discovers that anxiety is the biggest emotional obstacle in foreign language learning.And high-anxiety leads to a lower language input and output. Oral English anxiety,which makes many learners feel uneasy and worry, is a complicated psychological phenomenon in language learning process. Therefore, it is necessary and significant to find an appropriate way to relieve students' oral English anxiety.Metacognitive strategies are not only the management steps for learners to learn a foreign language successfully, but also the strategies to monitor, adjust, or guide one's learning behaviors. There are four strategies in metacognitive strategies:planning strategy, monitoring strategy, debugging strategy and evaluation strategy. In recent years, more and more researchers combine metacognitive strategies with English learning to conduct some researches. However, according to the literature review, the author discovers that there are only few researches combining matacognitive strategies with oral English anxiety.The present study aims to explore the influence of metacognitive strategies on non-English majors' oral English anxiety. The author tries to study the following two questions:(1) Can the students' oral English anxiety be relieved after using the metacognitive strategies?(2) Can the students' oral English performance be improved after the relief of their oral English anxiety?Eighty-two non-English majors majoring in Biological Science in Shandong Normal University were invited to join in this research. And all the students werefreshmen who came from two parallel natural classes. The two classes were chosen randomly to be the experimental class and the control class. Before the experiment, an oral English level test was conducted in the two classes and then two questionnaires about metacognitive strategies' use and oral English anxiety were given out to all the participants. In the following fourteen weeks, all the students from the experimental class were trained to use metacognitive strategies in the first two weeks. After the metacognitive strategies' training, the students were asked to use metacognitive strategies in their oral English learning while the students in the control class learned oral English in the traditional way. After fourteen weeks of the experiment, an oral English level test was carried out separately in the two classes and all the students were required to do the questionnaires about metacognitive strategies' use and oral English anxiety again. In the end of this term, the author randomly chose twenty students from the experimental class to interview their views about metacognitive strategies and oral English anxiety. By using SPSS 22.0, the present study drew to the following conclusions:(1) After the teaching experiment, students in the experimental class reduced their oral English anxiety obviously while students' oral English anxiety of the control class was not relieved. This indicates that metacognitive strategies can relieve students' oral English anxiety.(2) After the relief of oral English anxiety, students in the experimental class made greater progress than those in the control class in terms of holistic score,pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary and grammar, fluency and communicative competence. This indicates that the relief of oral English anxiety can improve students' oral English performance.Based on the above results of the study, it is necessary and feasible to apply metacognitive strategies to relieve students' oral English anxiety and then improve students' oral English performance. In this thesis, the author also comes up with some pedagogical implications for teachers and students. At the same time, the author summarizes the limitations of the present study and proposes some suggestions for the future research.