The Research On English Learning Anxiety Of High School Students From A Multi-dimensional Perspective

More and more researchers paid attention to second language acquisition field since the 1990 s.Simultaneously,learners' affective factors get appropriate research as well.Therefore,foreign language anxiety,as one of the significant affective factors in students' achievement and personal development,needs a thorough and systemic study.However,the survey shows that in the last four decades,the studies on anxiety only focus on the essence of anxiety,the scales of anxiety,the relationship between anxiety and achievement and the relationship between anxiety and other affective factors.What is more,most of the researches only keep an eye on one aspect,which is the listening anxiety,speaking anxiety,reading anxiety or writing anxiety.And few researchers conducted a thorough and systemic study on four dimensions.Besides there is no doubt that all the four skills equally play significant role in students' achievement and development.Therefore,the paper reports an empirical study on foreign language anxiety of 240 high school students in Hebei from a multi-dimensional perspective.The study tries to explore respectively the students' anxiety level of the four dimensions,the relationship between anxiety and gender and the correlation between anxiety and achievement.Specifically,here are the three questions that are proposed:What is the general state of students' anxiety levels from the four dimensions? i.e.listening anxiety,speaking anxiety,reading anxiety,and writing anxiety.What is the relationship between English learning anxiety and gender in different dimensions?What is the correlation between students' English learning anxiety and their English achievement in different dimensions?Through the well-established measurements and the qualified analysis,the conclusion draws as follows:Students do really experience different levels of anxiety and specifically,among the four dimensions,it is speaking anxiety,listening anxiety,writing anxiety and reading anxiety arranging from high to low.There is different anxiety level between the male students and the female students,the male students are more anxious than the females in four dimensions,but the difference is not significant in listening,reading and writing,there is significant difference between the male students and the female students in speaking anxiety.The correlation between achievement and anxiety is in moderate negative levels in four dimensions,which means,the higher the anxiety is,the lower scores the students get in English achievement.The study provides some implications for English teaching,for example,teachers should pay much attention to students' oral English,and give appropriate oral practice in class.What is more,it is important to lay stress on gender difference and encourage the male students to speak.In addition,during the teaching,some instructions to treat anxiety properly are needed,and there are some measures to lower the students' anxiety level,such as constructing harmonious class,encouraging students to participate colorful activities and so on.