Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of Study

With the development of research on second language or foreign languageacquisition, the research emphasis about the foreign language and the second languagemoves from language teaching to language learning. People began to pay much attentionto the essence of foreign language acquisition and relevant factors which effect thelanguage acquisition.Affective factors gain increasing attention, such as anger, frustration,esteem, anxiety, motivation, tolerance of ambiguity and so on. Many researchers havemade some studies to prove that the affective state of learners plays an important role intheir language learning process.Among these affective factors, anxiety is thought to be an important factor thathinders the learning process. Anxiety is related to some negative feelings, such as unrest,upset, self-doubt, fear and stress. Language anxiety is also in the top of factorsinfluencing language learning.The research of foreign language anxiety generally started in the mid 1960s. In thestudy of anxiety and second language or foreign language acquisition, early scholars paidmuch attention to the correlation between foreign language anxiety and the academicachievement, and analyzed what influence and role that the foreign language anxiety playin second language acquisition. But the most researches are a kind of macroscopic surveyand exploration. In recent years, the researchers gradually do a micro and deep analysisabout the acquisition process of language skills which include listening, speaking, reading,writing and translating.

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1.2 Significance of Study

1.2.1 Theoretical Significance

Since the curriculum reform of our country in 2001, the elementary educationcurriculum reforms begin to pay more and more attention to the development of students’emotion attitude. The positive emotion helps learners improve their English learning,while the negative emotion affects learners’ English learning. In recent years, researchersabout foreign language education have done a lot of research about the relations betweenemotions and foreign language learning and they have obtained some important researchachievement. The most important conclusion is that solving emotion problems can helpimprove the effect of language learning. The negative emotions such as disgust, dread,shyness, tension, anxiety, doubt, anger, depression and so on all can influence the normalplay of learners’ learning potential. However, anxiety, as an aspect of emotions, gainsmore and more attention. Since the 1980s, the foreign researchers have done a lot ofresearches on listening, speaking and examination which are easy to have anxiety. Theresearches go on deepening.The theory of second language acquisition thinks that more input can produceenough intake. Then, you can output. As one channel of input, reading the static writingmaterial can help readers focus the needing target by repeated reading and if in necessary,it is easy to turn to dictionary. It can be said that reading is the main source of languageinput and accumulation.

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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 The Definitions and Classification of Anxiety

In contemporary psychology, anxiety is used to refer an emotional state which iscaused by tension, nervousness, uneasiness, apprehension or dread. Recently, with thedeep research about anxiety, language researchers began to realize that anxiety alsoinfluences language leaning. So, it is widely applied to language research fields.Different person has different opinion on the definitions of anxiety and it is difficultto reach a consensus. Among the different definitions of anxiety, some definitions producecertain effect. From psychological perspective, anxiety is defined as an inappropriate fearwhich results from response to certain vague and dangerous situations and events in theoutside world. As one of most noticeable and pervasive emotions, anxiety is defined as afeeling of uneasy suspense. Cha took the role of personality into consideration anddefined that anxiety is an apprehension caused by a threat, but the individual holds that asa person alive, it is one part of his feelings. From a cognitive perspective, anxiety isregarded as an unpleasant emotional state or condition. It comes from subjective feelingssuch as tension, apprehension and worry, and it is activated or aroused by the autonomicnervous system that accompanies these feelings (Spielberger: 1972: 19). Additionally,some researchers provided anxiety from the physiological aspect. Leary (1982)characterized anxiety as a cognitive-affective response which is aroused by physiology. Itis a kind of apprehension related to a potential negative outcome that the individualperceives it is coming soon (Leary: 1982:99). It is generally accepted that anxiety is akind of person’s subjective feeling, such as tension, apprehension, frustration, worry andnervousness. They are aroused by the autonomic nervous system, and anxiety is anemotion state of apprehension, an uneasy understanding fear that is indirectly associatedwith some certain things.

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2.2 Language Anxiety

All people may experience anxiety of different degrees at one time or another, inthis or that situation. If anxiety occurs during one’s learning language, it is calledlanguage anxiety. It is a kind of emotion aroused by tension, worry, fear or apprehensionoccurring when a learner is in a foreign language environment, or he is expected to dosomething that is related to the foreign language. This anxiety is directly connected withtheir performing in the target language. Therefore, it is not just a general performance anxiety but a combination with such negative feeling as nervousness, uneasiness,self-denial and frustration. Many students believe that language class is moreanxiety-provoking than any other classes they have. So, in language classes, we can easyfind that students who feel more anxious are less likely to answer questions actively or toactively participate in oral classroom activities. Those anxious are often inclined to avoidsome difficult linguistic structures and to produce smaller words than more relaxed ones.Besides that, in contrast with more relaxed students, those anxious sometimes feel thatlanguage class moves too rapidly and they have more difficulty in making speech andexpressing themselves.Many researchers have made great effort to explain why language anxiety occurs.Some conclude that language anxiety is related to communication, test and self-evaluation.The higher language ability is, the lower language anxiety is. While others indicate thatthose students who always hold negative concepts of themselves on language will havehigh language anxiety. Another suggests that those students who have difficulties inspeaking, listening and memorizing for language will experience anxiety in languageclasses. By carrying out all these studies, researchers focus on one aim to find out somegood and effective ways to overcome language anxiety so that language learning can bemuch easier. It is teachers’ priorities to alleviate anxiety-raising environment of languagelearning and increase students’language acquisition.

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CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY.....18

3.1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS........18

3.2 SUBJECTS......18

3.3 INSTRUMENTS.....19

3.4 DATACOLLECTION ANDANALYSIS.......20

CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION......21

4.1 QUESTION ONE:.......21

4.2 QUESTION TWO:......22

4.3 QUESTION THREE:.........26

4.4 QUESTION FOUR:.....31

CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION....39

5.1 MAIN FINDINGS........39

5.2 IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING........39

5.3 LIMITATIONS OF PRESENT STUDY.........43

5.4 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY.....44

Chapter Four Results and Discussion

4.1 Question One:

Do freshmen in senior school experience foreign language reading anxiety inChinese context? If so, to what degree they experience the anxiety?The following is the descriptive statistical analysis of the FLRAS aiming atanswering the first research question. Table 1 provides a summary of the FLRAS scoresof all the participating subjects. As Table 1 showed, the scores of FLRAS of the whole participants in the presentstudy ranged from 41 to 95. The mean score of FLRAS is 62.19 and with a standarddeviation of 10.171. According to Table 1, there are 45.5% subjects get scores of FLRASwhich are lower than 60 and 54.5% subjects get scores of FLRAS which are higher than60.In a word, the freshmen in senior school indeed experience anxiety in foreignlanguage reading. In order to have a clearer picture of anxiety experienced by thefreshmen in senior school in the English reading, author made a cross cultural comparisonof scores of FLRAS. Saito et al. abroad and Shi in China both have studied the readinganxiety of university students. As displayed in Table 2, the mean of Saito et al.’ study(1999) is 52.9 and the mean of Shi and Liu’s study (2006) is 57. In this study, the mean is62.19.

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Conclusion

After the research about foreign language reading anxiety among freshmen in seniorschools, author found some findings. They are listed in the following part:One, freshmen indeed experience foreign language reading anxiety in their readingprocess and they experience a little higher anxiety than the students from colleges anduniversities.Two, the findings of this study show foreign language reading anxiety issignificantly negatively related to the reading achievement of freshmen in senior schools.To a great degree, it indicated high level of English reading anxiety negatively blocks thereading improvement and reading achievement of freshmen in senior school. Obviously,in terms of reading comprehension score, those who experience high level of readinganxiety are much lower than those who experience low level of reading anxiety.Three, the study finds that different gender showed different levels of foreignlanguage reading anxiety. Male participants are more easy to be anxious than femaleparticipants in the process of their reading. From the questionnaire, it showed that Malestudents’ reading anxiety score are much higher than female students in eight items. Andthese are mainly the sources why male students experience higher foreign languagereading anxiety than female students do. What’s more, students’ satisfaction is negativelyrelated to their foreign language reading anxiety.

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Reference (omitted)