A Survey On Senior High School Students' Speaking Anxiety In English Classes

Foreign language classroom anxiety is one of the emotional factors that hinder foreign language learning process.Through reviewing the literature,it is found that most researchers believe that spoken English is the easiest to cause learners' anxiety in the four skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing.In recent years,foreign language learning anxiety has been more and more concerned by many people,and scholars have done a lot of related research.However,related information suggested that the subjects of the early researches were mainly junior middle school students and college students.In fact,there are very few studies on the anxiety of spoken English in senior high school.Therefore,this thesis takes the study of English speaking anxiety of senior high school students as the research topic.The purpose is to find effective methods to reduce anxiety by investigating and analyzing the oral anxiety of high school students.In order to find out the specific problems in the current situation of anxiety,some solutions would be put forward to solve these problems,which will help to achieve better oral teaching effects.Based on Krashen's Affective Filtering Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis theory defined by Swain,this study takes 246 students from three ordinary high schools in Wuzhou,Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region as the research subjects.It adopts quantitative research and qualitative research methods to investigate the present status of their speaking anxiety.The results of the questionnaire were calculated in the statistical software SPSS19.0 for data analysis.In the qualitative study,15 students were randomly selected from 246 subjects for interviews.It aims to find out the potential sources and related factors of speaking anxiety of senior high school by means of questionnaire and interview.The research is to explore the following questions:(1)What is the overall status of the oral English classroom anxiety of senior high student?(2)Is there any significant difference between different genders,arts and sciences and region in English classroom anxiety?(3)What are the problems discovered by the investigation and what are the reasons in the English classroom anxiety?The main findings of the study are as follows:(1)The overall level of English speaking anxiety of senior high school students is a little bit high.Among these anxieties,classroom anxiety has the highest average,and then followed by fear of negative evaluation anxiety,and finally the communication apprehension anxiety.(2)There is not significant difference between male and female students.While arts students experience a less anxious feeling than science students.This is due to the different cognitive styles of the students.Except for arts and sciences difference,regional differences in anxiety level are significant.The speaking anxiety of students from rural areas is higher than that of students from urban.This is due to the learning environment and learning style of rural students leading to the emergence of oral anxiety.Basing on the findings of this study,the author comes up with some suggestions on how to reduce the English speaking anxiety of senior high school students.First,in the English class,teachers can create a relaxed and active classroom atmosphere to reduce the level of classroom anxiety,at the same time they can design oral activities according to the needs of students.Second,in aspect of correcting students' oral errors,teachers should pay more attention to the way of correcting to improve students' confidence and interest in learning spoken language.Third,teachers can improve and promote students' oral English by group cooperative learning in English classes.The research findings in this paper show that oral English teaching needs to be improved in relieving students' anxiety.This paper hopes to explore the causes of anxiety and propose countermeasures to reduce students' oral English anxiety.But at the same time,it also points out some limitations of this research and provides suggestions for future studies.