初中生英语听力焦虑及应对策略分析(2)
In the teaching activities of the reality, however, we found that there are a lot of the junior middle school students with fear on hearing, prone to cause anxiety. Anxiety is one of the main factors in all the emotional factors, which has a great effect on foreign language learning. Generally speaking, when someone cannot overcome threats of obstacles which have made their confidence and pride tumbled or unable to reach their target for long term, the mood of nervousness and the sense of failure and guilt will be increased. This kind of emotion is called anxiety. However, anxiety also exists in language learning. If anxiety is not released, it will be difficult for students to improve their listening comprehension, and even lose confidence in improving their listening skills. Therefore, how to reduce the listening anxiety and improve students’ listening skills are the purposes of this paper. Besides, the paper will mainly introduce anxiety problems and analyze of junior middle school students in English listening comprehension.
II. Literature Review
Anxiety is experienced by everyone which is research object concerned by psychologists in the middle of 1960s. Language teaching researchers have noticed that anxiety is a very important factor in the process of second language acquisition. Different researchers have different opinions and definitions on it.
2.1 Definition of Anxiety
Scholars define anxiety from different aspects and different people have their own opinions on it. The definition of anxiety was made by Horwitz. According to him, “anxiety is the subjective feeling of tense, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system” (23). Listening anxiety refers to the fact that the listeners feel anxious when they cannot understand or fully deal with the received information.
2.2 Studies on Anxiety
Foreign education researchers from different angles did a lot of researches on anxiety. Alpert and Haber’s research pided anxiety into facilitative anxiety and debilitative anxiety in terms of property. Facilitative anxiety made learners to be vigilant and productive, motivated them to adjust the new task; debilitative anxiety rendered learners have the nervous mood, and escaped learning task (68). When we pointed out this phenomenon in foreign language classroom, anxiety in listening and speaking was particularly presented as a psychological factor. Anxiety has been recognized as one of the most important affective variables influencing foreign language learning. It is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. Krashen maintained that “anxiety inhibited the learner’s ability to process incoming language and short-circuited the process of acquisition” (56). Furthermore, serious language anxiety may cause other related problems with self-esteem, self-confidence, and risk-taking ability, and ultimately hampers proficiency in the second language. Tobias has pointed out “some students with high levels of foreign language anxiety even have a mental block, similar to that experienced by students studying mathematics” (35). However, as far as anxiety and Foreign Language Anxiety are concerned, it is really a tough job for the researchers to define precisely. Foreign language anxiety was a complex psychological construct and difficult to be precisely defined, perhaps due to the intricate hierarchy of intervening variables.
There are many Chinese scholars who did researches on listening anxiety. Yang Jin adopted the FLAS to test the students’ anxiety in listening process. He chose the young learners, final term listening grades as the instrument and found that listening anxiety was positively related with some students’ grades but there was no relationship with other students’ grades. In addition, Chen Xiuling conducted a study, which mainly suggested that both the facilitating anxiety and inhibition of anxiety had some effects on English listening comprehension.
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