A Study Of The Correlation Between Vocabulary Preparation Time And English Listening Comprehension And Anxiety Of Senior High School Students

Learners' affective factors play a vital role in SLA,which affects learners' learning behaviors and learning outcomes.Anxiety is one of the most important affective factors and plays a crucial role in the second language classroom,especially the listening anxiety.Listening anxiety often affects learners' listening comprehension,which leads to poor learning outcomes.To some extent,vocabulary preparation time can alleviate listening anxiety and improve listening comprehension.However,the current researches have mainly explored qualitatively,lacking quantitative research.Therefore,this thesis tries to explore quantitative relationship between vocabulary preparation time and English listening comprehension together with listening anxiety of senior high school students,with an aim to find the best word preparation time to facilitate foreign language listening comprehension and reduce anxiety in foreign languages.The subjects are 254 students of senior two in a middle school in Fujian province.They are engaged in the same English listening comprehension task,prior to which they have made vocabulary preparation for three different time spans,namely,one week,one day and thirty minutes.This thesis employs the modified version of Kim's Foreign Language Listening and Anxiety Scale to measure students' degree of anxiety,respectively before and after vocabulary preparation,and tries to compare their differences in anxiety.And then the school English midterm test scores and Victor English enhanced listening comprehension test scores are used as evaluation of the subjects' professional levels of listening comprehension.Finally,SPSS is used to carry out descriptive statistics analysis and one-way ANOVA to quantitatively study the influence of vocabulary preparation time on English listening anxiety and listening comprehension of senior high school students.Through data analysis,the author finds that: First of all,vocabulary preparation time do affects the subjects' listening comprehension,and different word preparation time has different influence on listening comprehension.Moreover,the effect of vocabulary preparation time on listening comprehension is not a simple linear relationship.There exists a favorable time to facilitate foreign language listening comprehension.In this thesis,the best time is one day.Either too long or too short vocabulary preparation time will result in learners' poor listening performance.Secondly,vocabulary preparation time also has a great impact on listening anxiety.The degree of English listening anxiety will be different when the time of vocabulary preparation is changed.Similar to the relationship between vocabulary preparation time and listening comprehension,the influence of vocabulary preparation time on listening anxiety is not a simple linear relationship,and there is still an optimal time to help reduce foreign language listening anxiety.In this thesis,the best time to alleviate listening anxiety is also a day.Either too long or too short vocabulary preparation time will result in listeners' anxiety,while moderate vocabulary preparation time will ease their listening anxiety.At the end of the thesis,some suggestions are put forward on how to reduce high school students' English listening anxiety and improve their listening comprehension.Finally,the shortcomings of this paper are summarized and the future research direction is also prospected.