4.3 Suggested countermeasures to reduce students’ listening anxiety 19

Chapter Five Conclusion 22

5.1 Major findings 22

5.2 limitations 22

References 24

Appendix1 26

Appendix2 27

Causes and Countermeasures of Senior High School Students' Listening Anxiety 

Chapter One  Introduction

1.1 Background

During the 1970s, the research on second language acquisition has made significant progress. However, many researchers paid much attention to cognitive factors in the field of second language acquisition, neglecting the importance of affective factors in language learning. With the development of humanistic psychology, lots of researchers shifted their attention from the external environment to the study of the internal components. They studied a lot on the relationships between the affective factors (like empathy, self-esteem, anxiety, motivation) and foreign language study, holding the view that learners’ affective factors play a vital role in foreign language study. Among these factors, anxiety is regarded as a barrier in the process of learning.

Horwitz & Cope (1986) believed that listening is most likely to cause learners’ anxiety among the four basic skills in foreign language learning. Students need to catch the meaning instantaneously during listening which is relatively difficult to them and therefore causes the feeling of anxiety. Furthermore, the Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standard of Jiangsu Province (experimented) also puts the requirements of students’ listening skills into a new level. Thus, the issue of listening anxiety should be in an important position concerning English classroom teaching in senior high school. 

1.2 Significance of the paper

By studying the previous researches at home and abroad about language and listening anxiety, most of them put emphasis on college students or junior middle school students’ listening anxiety but few of them select senior high school students as subjects. As is known to all, senior high school students have to suffer from more study and test pressure than college students and junior middle school students. So, the problems of listening anxiety of high school students deserve more attention. Thus, this paper aims to study the current situation of listening anxiety and the usages of listening strategy of senior high school students, and the present teaching methods of English listening teaching in senior high school to find out the causes and influencing factors of their listening anxiety. Finally, some countermeasures are put forward to deal with students’ listening anxiety.

1.3 Structures of the paper

This paper is pided into five parts. Chapter One is an introduction which includes the background, the significance and structure of this paper. Chapter Two is the literature review, in which introduces the previous studies on language anxiety and listening anxiety. This part gives a basis of further studies by the former researchers’ views on definition and causes of listening anxiety. Chapter Three is concerned with the methodology of this study, the subjects of this study are 210 Grade one students and 20 English teachers in Tongshan middle school and the data of these questionnaires is collected and analyzed on online software—SO JUMP. Chapter Four provides the results and analysis of the study, which includes the current status of listening anxiety of senior high school students, present situation of listening teaching in senior high school, and major factors influencing listening anxiety of senior high school students. Then, some problems in present listening teaching are found out by this analysis. Furthermore, some suggestions and countermeasures to improve senior high school students’ listening learning and teachers’ teaching are put forward. Finally, the last chapter concludes the major findings of this paper and reflects the limitations. 高中生外语听力焦虑的原因与对策(2):http://www.chuibin.com/yingyu/lunwen_206270.html