A Correlation Study On English Listening Style Preference And Listening Anxiety Of Senior High School Students

Scholars abroad and at home have done a great many researches on listening teaching,which are mainly surrounded with the factors influencing listening including background knowledge,contexts and listening strategies,listening style preference and listening anxiety and so on.Research results on listening anxiety are abundant abroad and at home while so far empirical researches on listening style preference are relatively very few,especially those discussion about the correlation between listening style preference and listening anxiety is more fewer.Built on such research background,the author chose senior high school students as research objects in this thesis and studied the correlation between listening style preference and listening anxiety of senior high school students.The aim of this thesis is to increase teachers and students' attention on listening style preference and improve their listening style preference so that students could alleviate listening anxiety and enhance their English listening proficiency.Main research questions are as followed:(1)What is the distribution of listening style preference and the situation of listening anxiety of senior high school students in English listening comprehension?(2)What is the correlation between English listening style preference and listening anxiety?(3)What are the differences on levels of listening anxiety of students with different listening styles?(4)What reasons are responsible for the differences on levels of listening anxiety of students with different listening styles?The theoretical framework adopted in this thesis is based on Schema Theory and Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis Theory in second language acquisition theories.This research employs the mixed design of quantitative and qualitative approaches.In this research,According to Xu Jinfen and Li Banban's research results,students are categorized into analytic,global and synthetic listening styles.According to Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale adapted by Kim,students are categorized into low-level,intermediate-level and high-level listening anxiety.For the quantitative part,the author invites 80 students from grade one in senior high school in Yangzhou City,Jiangsu province as research subjects and uses two questionnaires including Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale(FLLAS)and Listening Style Preference Questionnaire(LSPQ)as experimental instruments.80 valid are collected from 80 questionnaires.For the qualitative perspective,6 students from participants are chosen to have interviews by stratified sampling.Among 6 students,two students belong to analytic style,two employing global style and two owning synthetic style.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis,it can be concluded as follows:Firstly,three kinds of listening style preferences like analytic,global and synthetic listening style popularly exist among senior high school students during English listening process.Among three listening styles,51%of the participants belong to analytic style,18%of the whole belong to global style and the rest 31%belong to synthetic style.Additionally,listening anxiety is commonly popular among senior high school students.29%of the whole belong to high-level anxiety,45%belong to intermediate-level anxiety and 26%belong to low-level anxiety.Secondly,there is a correlation between listening style and listening anxiety(P=.000).Different listening styles have significant differences on levels of listening anxiety.Analytic listening style correlates with listening anxiety the most,global style the next and synthetic style is the least.Learners of analytic style suffer from the highest level of listening anxiety,global style suffer from the intermediate level of listening anxiety and synthetic style suffer from the lowest level of listening anxiety.Thirdly,students of different listening styles have great differences on level of listening anxiety.The average value of listening anxiety of learners with analytic style is the highest.The average value of listening anxiety of learners with global style is the next.And the average value of listening anxiety of learners with synthetic style is the lowest.Comparisons between each two listening styles all have significant differences.Besides,Analytic style is significantly higher than global and synthetic style and global style is little higher than synthetic style.Fourthly,through interviews after questionnaires,it can be seen that differences of levels of listening anxiety are generated because students have differences in term of listening cognitive strategies,listening meta-cognitive strategies,background knowledge and quantity of vocabulary.The results of this study have some implications.From the teachers,aspect,when teaching listening,they should pay more attention to students with analytic and global listening style,improve their listening style preferences and alleviate listening anxiety.Teachers need to guide students to use suitable listening strategies including focusing on vocabulary and grammar information and grasping the gist of the whole passage.Additionally,teachers can guide students to monitor and reflect on the listening process.They also should encourage students to understand more about current affairs and news,cultural knowledge and historical background at home and abroad.From the students' perspective,they should understand their own listening style and adopt proper listening cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies.Students need to monitor and reflect on the listening comprehension.What's more,students should be encouraged to accumulate extracurricular knowledge and increase the quantity of vocabulary.They can try to transfer from analytic and global style to synthetic style to improve listening level.