A Multi-Dimellsional Study On English Majors’ Foreign Language Anxiety

Language anxiety, as one of the most important affective variables, can be defined as a distinctive form of anxiety in response to language learning. Many empirical studies have proved the negative relationship between foreign language anxiety and proficiency. In the past decades, numerous studies at home and abroad have consistently been conducted on language-skill-specific anxieties, such as listening anxiety, reading anxiety, writing anxiety and speaking anxiety.In China, there are many studies related to foreign language anxiety, but the systematic study of English majors’ anxiety in listening, reading, writing and speaking is rare. On the basis of relevant studies, the present study mainly intends to answer the following questions:1) What’s the anxiety state of English majors in listening, reading writing, and speaking respectively?2) Are there any differences in English majors’ anxiety degree among the four dimensions? If there are, what are they?3) Are there any differences in anxiety degree between English majors in high grade and low grade among the four dimensions? If there are, what are they and why?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the study with the subject sample of 200 English majors from Jiangxi Normal University, including 100 freshmen and 100 juniors.Data for the study were collected from 4 questionnaires and a semi-structured interview. The questionnaires include the Chinese version of Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale(Elkhafaifi, 2005), Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale(Saito, 1999), Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory(Cheng, 2004) and Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Self-Sehema Questionnaire for Undergraduate Student(We Wensheng, 2009), which were used to measure English majors’ listening anxiety, reading anxiety, writing anxiety and speaking anxiety respectively. With the help of SPSS 16.0, descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA and independent sample T-Test were computed with the target samples. The interview included 10 low-grade students and 10 high-grade students, mainly exploring the reasons of their differences in anxiety level.After data analysis, the author came to the following conclusions:1) The Descriptive Statistics indicates that English majors experience moderate degree of anxiety in each language-skill–specific dimension(listening, reading,writing and speaking).2) The One-way ANOVA reveals that the anxiety degree of each dimension is various from each other. Listening is the most anxiety-provoking dimension for English majors; what follows listening anxiety is writing anxiety and speaking anxiety.Moreover, reading anxiety is the lowest and it is significantly different from the other three dimensions.3) The Independent-samples T Test shows that there are no significant differences of anxiety degree between English majors in high grade and low grade among listening anxiety, writing anxiety and reading anxiety. In the dimension of speaking, the anxiety degree of high-grade English majors is significantly higher than that of low-grade English majors. The results of interviews reveal that freshmen have a stronger desire to practice their oral English because they are interested in various oral English activities which they haven’t participated in high school,while some juniors feel tired of English and English class after three years’ study and lose the interest in participating in various oral English activities, thus the time for them to practice is much less than before.