DOC《外国语学院英语系》

焦虑的分类;

听力水平;

学习策略 1. Introduction 1.1 Background of the present thesis With the education focus on the whole person development and the focus shift from how to teach students to how to teach students how to learn, more and more researchers and educators pay attention to the individual learner differences in language learning performances. In recent years, the variable of anxiety greatly lead to the interest of language experts and attracts them to do a mass of researches and investigations, especially in the area of second language acquisition, more and more researchers and educators have taken learner variables, especially affective factors into account because students are physical, cognitive and primarily emotional beings (Rogers, 1976, see Broom, 1994). Among all the affective factors, foreign language anxiety is considered to be one of the most important related to success in language learning. In the past three decades, many studies have repeatedly proved that foreign language anxiety has great influence on language learning process and is one of the best predictors for individual differences in language learning success. Meanwhile many linguists and psychologists think that anxiety is negatively associated with language learning outcomes and they insist that reducing anxiety might improve learners'

motivation and increase their foreign language learning (MacIntyre, 1995;

MacIntyre&

Gardner, 1989;

etc). Since 1980, research on anxiety has been united with specific language skills such as listening, reading, speaking and writing. Among them, Horwitz, Horwitz&

Cope (1986) states that listening might be the most anxiety-causing and problematic for foreign language learners. Listening comprehension is a very complex process;

it does not exist in place, but in time. It is only one-dimensioned, and it can never come back, so listeners must remember what they listen at that moment. When listeners do not have appropriate listening ability, the information declines rapidly and they will not understand simple dispersive information, lose the first significant items of information (Kim, 2000). Therefore, learners may have anxiety more easily during this process In order to remit or eliminate listening anxiety and improve listening level, students must use proper and useful listening comprehension strategies. In fact, a vast body of various research on the relationship between English listening anxiety and English listening comprehension strategy use indicates that students with better English listening outcomes generally use English listening comprehension strategies more frequently and during their listening process, they are less anxious than those who seldom use listening strategies (Oxford, 1997;

O'

Malley&

Chamot, 1990;

Wu, 2005;

Zhou, 2003). From this, both teachers and students can know the importance of listening comprehension strategy instruction or training. It can help students learn grammars and vocabularies, master western cultures and ideas and then enhance their English listening level. English listening comprehension strategies is very important. Given the urgency of improving foreign language listening and the inadequacies of language-skill-specific anxiety exploration, this thesis attempts to carry out an empirical and systematical study of foreign language listening anxiety of non-English majors in Chinese context. The foreign language listening anxiety in this study refers to the English anxiety specifically. Therefore, this study attempts to achieve the following objectives: 1) to examine whether university non-English majors will emerge anxiety when they listen to English;