kusairi

khuldinkusairi@yahoo.co.id

REPORT

Name : Khuldin kusairi

Npm : 06340110

Prody : English

Title:

A Study of High School Students’ English Learning Anxiety

Writer:

Zhao Na

Shandong University of Technology, China

Source:

http://www.asian-efl-journal.com Asian EFL Journal Press 2007

The Asian EFL Journal, Volume 9, Number 3

Problem Background:

It has been observed that some students in English classrooms experience anxiety that results in stuttering and fast heart-beating. These phenomena, all of which are attributed to a psychological state - anxiety - have been the research focus of many linguists and psychologists in recent years.

Much research (e.g., Bailey, 1983; Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope, 1986; MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994; Young, 1991), especially in western countries, has been conducted to find the relationship between anxiety and achievement in the learning of different foreign languages. Most studies (e.g., Horwitz, 1986; MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994) arrived at a conclusion that anxiety and achievement are negatively correlated.

In China, similar research has also been conducted with different groups of people. Most of them, however, were college students. High school students, who are still at a comparatively low level of English proficiency and thus more easily experience a feeling of uneasy suspense (Rachman, 1998), are overlooked by most researchers.

Research Purpose:

The author endeavored to bridge this gap to find out the situation of this neglected group’s English classroom anxiety through a study conducted in a key middle school of Shandong Province.

Research Question:

Based on my analysis, there is nothing research question in the article.

Data

The subjects of the study were 115 second-year high school students (56 males and 59 females).They were from a science class and an arts class of a high school in Shandong Province. Their average age was 16. They all had 5-8 years of experience of English learning.

Example Data

Two instruments were used for this study. They were a questionnaire assessing students’ anxiety level and an achievement test. The questionnaire consisted of two parts. One was intended to collect personal information of the participants, such as their name, age, gender, etc.. This questionnaire consists of 33 statements, of which 8 items were for communication anxiety (1, 9, 14, 18, 24, 27, 29, 32), 9 items for fear of

Negative evaluation (3, 7, 13, 15, 20, 23, 25, 31, 33) and 5 items for test anxiety (2, 8, 10, 19, 21).As for the remaining 11 items, they were put in a group which was named anxiety of English classes. The respondents were asked to rate each item on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1(“strong disagreement”) to 5 (“strong agreement”).

The test used to assess students’ English achievement was the final exam administered at the end of the semester. The test paper included five parts: multiple choice, cloze, reading comprehension, error correction and writing, which were intended to assess students’ overall ability in language use. All testing items were drawn from a test bank, which ensured the reliability of test paper.

Frame Work Analysis

According to Horwitz, (1986): Anxiety, simply speaking, is a kind of troubled feeling in the mind.

. Trait anxiety, as Scovel (1978) noted, refers to “a more permanent predisposition to be anxious” while state and situation-specific anxiety are usually experienced in relation to some particular event or situation (Brown, 2001).

According to Gardner and MacIntyre, (1993). Language anxiety, the research target of this paper, belongs to the last category, which refers to the apprehension experienced when a situation requires the use of a second language with which the individual is not fully proficient.

According to Young (1991), there are six potential causes of language anxiety which include personal and interpersonal, learner beliefs about language learning, instructor beliefs about language teaching, instructor-learner Interactions, classroom procedures and language tests.

Krashen (1985) once held in his affective filter hypothesis that high anxiety will prevent input that learners receive in the classroom from reaching the language acquisition device.

MacIntyre and Gardner (1994), based on a study of 97 college students that learn French, concluded that compared with more relaxed learners, those with anxiety find it more difficult to express their own views and tend to underestimate their own abilities.

Bailey’s (1983) study of competitiveness and anxiety, it was found that facilitative anxiety was one of the keys to success, and closely related to competitiveness.

In Zhang Baoyan’s (1996) study of English learners in Taiwan, the results showed that there was no relationship between anxiety and learning achievement.

Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986) have been the most influential about it.

Unit of Analysis

Horwitz and Cope (1986) have been the most influential. They identified three causes of language anxiety, that is, communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. Based on these three components they also designed a Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale including thirty-three items. This scale was later widely used by researchers to measure foreign language learners’ anxiety and examine the effect of anxiety on learning in different contexts.

Finding

The results of the descriptive analyses showed that there were 16 items whose means were above 3.00. And of all the statements the 9th one had the highest index of 3.6579. The mean of the anxiety indices of all the subjects in English classrooms, as Table 1 shows, was 2.9310 which indicated that the high school students indeed had the feeling of anxiety in their English classrooms. Moreover, through the computation of means and standard deviations of each kind of anxiety, it was found that students’ fear of negative evaluation, the mean of which reached 3.1828, was especially serious. Among the 16 items whose mean values were higher than 3.00 there were 7 statements concerning it, especially item 3, the mean of which was as high as 3.6579.

Conclusion

This paper has presented some findings of high school students’ anxiety in Chinese EFL classroom. It was found that most students experienced anxiety in classrooms, especially the fear of negative evaluation.

Given the situation that anxiety is prevalent in Chinese high school English classrooms teachers must pay more attention to it.

First of all, they can try to create a relaxed atmosphere for students, which can make them feel safe to speak or express their views.

Secondly, teachers should avoid negative evaluation of students in classrooms and comment on students’ behaviors with more encouragement.

Thirdly, teachers, together with our schools, should take some measures to relax students’ attention on exams, such as eliminating the ranking of students by their test scores.

Finally, teachers can also explicitly tell students the inevitability of the existence of anxiety in English learning and let them know that anxiety can be reduced through the self-regulation of their thinking and study.