A Study On The Current Situation And Influencing Factors Of Students’ English Learning Anxiety In Senior High School

With the rise of humanistic psychology and the development of foreign language teaching research,more and more scholars regard emotion and cognition as the two most important aspects of foreign language learning.Anxiety,as one of the biggest emotional factors in language learning,has become a hot topic in the studies of second language acquisition at home and abroad since the 1970 s.However,in the researches of domestic scholars who started the anxiety research later than foreign researchers,the researches of senior high school students are not sufficient,and even fewer scholars divide the learners into different groups of language proficiency to investigate respectively.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate the foreign language learning anxiety of senior high school students to make up the deficiency in this aspect.Based on the above research background,the present research explored the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation of students’ English learning anxiety in senior high school?(2)What are the differences among students with different levels of proficiency in English learning anxiety?(3)What are the factors influencing English learning anxiety of senior high school students? In order to answer the above research questions,the present research adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology.The author used questionnaire and interview to investigate the students selected from Affiliated Middle School of Henan Normal University.The questionnaire was conducted using the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale(FLCAS)designed by Horwitz et al.(1986),which was adapted and supplemented according to the needs of this study;the interviews were semi-structured interviews to supply the questionnaire data.The data obtained from the research were entered into SPSS 24.0 for statistics and analysis.The results indicate the following findings:(1)Senior high school students’ English learning anxiety is generally at a moderate level,with the highest level of test anxiety.(2)Students of different levels of proficiency have differences in various dimensions of English learning anxiety,but the difference between students in the high-level group and those in the intermediate-level group is not significant.Furthermore,the higher English proficiency students have,the lower level of English learning anxiety they will experience.(3)The factors influencing senior high school students’ English learning anxiety can be attributed to testing,English learning beliefs,psychological characteristics of students and teacher-student interaction.In accordance with the above analysis and discussion,the author puts forward practical teaching suggestions to cope with foreign language anxiety from the four aspects,hoping to enrich domestic research in this respect and to provide some enlightenment when teachers face the problem of students’ foreign language learning anxiety.At the same time,it also provides some reference for scholars to carry out related researches in the future.