An Empirical Study On Foreign Language Anxiety Of Senior High School Students In Zhuang Minority Region:A Multidimensional Perspective

Anxiety,one of the most significant affective variables in language learning,has been of increasing interests to scholars specializing in second language acquisition since the 1970s.Research has been conducted from different perspectives to explore the dimensions of Foreign Language Anxiety(FLA),which have achieved fruitful results.Some studies are based on FLA in minority region,their focus not on elementary and high school students but on college students.Besides,they mainly covered a single language skill-specific anxiety,but failed to touch the cross-sectional multidimensional research.Region of ethnic groups,Guangxi enjoys the largest population of Zhuang minority in China.Ethnic culture may have great impact on the FLA of the students.The cross-sectional multidimensional study on high school students' FLA in the minority region can enrich the research results of FLA and promote the teaching quality of this region,which is of great practical significance and applied value.A total of 915 students from 3 high schools in Guangxi participated in this study with a multidimensional perspective of classroom,listening,speaking,reading and writing by quantitative and qualitative approaches,aiming to explore which is the strongest among the language skill-specific anxieties.Questionnaire and interview were employed to collect data and answer the following questions:1)What are the anxiety levels of the high school students who learned English as a foreign language in the Zhuang minority region?2)What are the correlations and differences of the four types of skill-specific language anxieties?3)Are there gender differences in the levels of FLA from different perspectives?4)Are there differences in the levels of FLA from different perspectives between Han and Zhuang nationality English learners?Results indicated that high school learners in Zhuang minority region showed a medium level of FLA on the five dimensions.Mean scores of these anxieties can be ranked as speaking,classroom,writing,reading and listening anxiety;of which,speaking provoked the highest level of anxiety,and writing did a significant higher level of anxiety than listening.In addition,there was the strongest interrelation between listening and reading anxiety,the weakest one between listening and speaking anxiety.Male and female students had significant differences in the communication anxiety factor and test anxiety factor of FLCAS,fear of negative assessment factor and avoidance tendency factor of FLSAS,FLRAS and avoidance tendency factor of FLWAS.Zhuang and Han nationality students were significantly different in the communication anxiety factor of FLCAS,FLLAS and low self-efficacy factor and low self-esteem factor of FLSAS.These findings suggest that high school teachers in this region should improve the awareness and perceptions of FLA;create harmonious classroom atmosphere;enhance students' self-confidence;and improve students' foreign language skills in order to reduce students' level of FLA.