张平

1.Empirical Investigation in a Senior High School

Anxiety is kind of uneasiness and fear caused by individuals lack of self-confidence or failure. Horwitz et al. （1986） take the lead in studying foreign language learning anxiety as an independent and different anxiety phenomenon. MacIntyre et al. （1991） reveal that anxious students have great trouble in listening comprehension as well as their memory about vocabularies.

So in this investigation， 198 senior high school students——108 boys and 90 girls， were chosen randomly from different grades and classes in the school. Among them， 30 students did well in English， 100 ranked the average level but 68 poor in English. Questionnaire was adopted in the research. It contains two parts： 1） some basic information of the 198 participants. 2） 33 items related to English learning anxiety both in and out of class. The answers consist of five ones， ranging from “strongly agree” （1 point） to “strongly disagree” （5 points）. The lower ones scores are， the higher his English learning anxiety degree is.

From the results shows： 25% of the students appear high level anxiety， about 60% of the subjects feel average anxiety and only a fraction of the participants feel a little anxious. 30% who are introverted show high anxiety while only 19% who are extroverted do. So introverted students are easier to get nervous and lose confidence. Senior three students may behave more anxiously for poor English proficiency than other two grades.Besides， top students are proved to be the least anxious while group two and three are higher. However， the poorest students are not as anxious as group two and three but even lower.

2. Causes Contributing to Students English Learning Anxiety

Internal factors： lack of self-confidence or low self-evaluation is the main internal factors of English learning anxiety in the School. Students with high anxiety are afraid of making mistakes or being laughed at. And students obviously need preparation and enough practice. Competitiveness is another important internal cause. Most students will compel themselves to study harder in order to obtain victory in the competition.

External factors： pressure from teachers and families high expectation brings students lots of anxiety. And its observed that there are huge differences on the attitudes toward English learning between middle and senior high school students： the former aims at developing interest while the latter pays more attention to exam grades.

3. Strategies to Moderate English Learning Anxiety

in the School

Students can try to sit in front rows and answer English questions more; take an active part in classroom and outside activities; communicate with others initiatively; form the habit of keeping English diary; face difficult language points with enough courage and so on. Face the negative evaluation correctly; make a clear learning plan. Teachers should assist students to face trouble and difficulty; continuously acknowledge the poor students achievements; provide a relatively relaxed classroom environment; attract more students to involve into class; strengthen their professional competence; set a good example for students. Parents should pay more attention to childrens words and deeds， so as to know well about their source of anxiety. And moderate expectation is beneficial to building confidence and ambition and lower expectation of parents is badly required.

Conclusion

This research is designed to conduct an empirical investigation on language learning among Chinese senior high school students in their English learning. As the data of the questionnaire shows： excessive anxiety is certainly harmful to students. So learners should adjust themselves through self-reflection and developing self-confidence; teachers can active classroom atmosphere and schedule the class reasonably; families should give more care and encouragement to the children. The result cannot represent the English learning anxiety of overall senior high school students. But hopefully， the results obtained in this study can contribute to the future researches.