A Study On Young English Learners' Speaking Anxiety

In recent years,foreign language teaching has changed from teacher-centered to student-centered,and with the development of humanistic psychology,affective factors in education attract extensive attention.As one of the important affective factors that influence foreign language learning,anxiety plays a significant role in causing differences among learners.Based on the fact that previous studies on anxiety in China mainly focused on adults,and paid less attention to young learner's English learning,this thesis tries to target the young English learners' anxiety in tutorial class.Then it carries out the investigation into their English speaking anxiety.A sample of 130 9-10-year-old children in a tutorial class from Shenzhen was selected as the participants.The research questions are as follows:(1)To what extent does foreign language speaking anxiety(FLSA)exist among young English learners in tutorial class?(2)Is there gender difference in speaking anxiety among young English learners?(3)Is there relationship between English speaking anxiety and oral English achievement? Questionnaire survey,oral test and interview will be adopted to carry out the research.First,four statistical procedures of SPSS 17.0 were used to analyze the data of questionnaire,including descriptive statistics,exploratory analysis,Independent T-test and Pearson's correlation analysis.Second,all the participants were required to finish three oral test tasks to get their achievement.Third,12 participants were chosen to take part in the semi-structured interviews so as to further verify the results of the questionnaire,and find out the reasons why speaking anxiety occurred.The conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1)The speaking anxiety of young English learners in tutorial class belongs to the moderate anxiety.(2)In terms of gender,there is no significant difference among the young English learners' speaking anxiety.(3)Young learners' speaking anxiety in tutorial class has significantly negative correlation with their oral achievement.