An Empirical Study On English Learning Anxiety Of The Left-behind Children In Rural Areas

Humanistic psychology was developed a lot from 1960 to 1969,and nowadays there are more and more domestic and foreign scholars who pay close attention to the emotional factors in English study.From all the factors,English learning anxiety is an important emotional factor with great influence on English learning process.Left-behind children in rural areas,as a widely recognized attention in recent years,a special group,their English learning anxiety has its particularity.Left-behind children's anxiety in English learning is the emphasis in this paper.As a special group,the studies of left-behind children's English learning anxiety are extremely rare either in China or in foreign countries.The author reviewed foreign language learning anxiety and the study of left-behind children domestic and overseas.Based on the results of those studies,the author selected 439 Junior Middle School students from Tanguan Junior Middle School as the research objects,using the questionnaire of foreign language classroom anxiety scale(FLCAS)which was designed by Horwitz and his colleagues.The research also interviewed ten left-behind children and two English teachers randomly,and tried to find the answers to the following questions:(1)What's the status quo of English learning anxiety of the left-behind children in Tanguan junior middle school?(2)How are the anxieties of the left-behind children different from those of non-left-behind ones?(3)What are the possible factors which could affect the left-behind children's English learning anxiety level?The author finds out that the left-behind children experience a relatively higher level of English learning anxiety than the others.Among all the three kinds of left-behind children,i.e.,the ones living with mothers,the ones living with fathers and the ones living without parents,the ones living with mothers are the most anxious for their wordy mothers.And further,the English learning anxiety of the left-behind boys' is higher than that of the left-behind girls'.Secondly,the left-behind children's English learning anxiety level is higher than that of the non-left-behind children's,which however does not differ significantly according to the Independent-samples T Test.Lastly,the author finds out that there are many factors influencing the left-behind children's English anxiety,among which parental supervision and self-esteem are the most protruding ones.