答辩陈述2

Presentation for Oral Defense

Good morning, dear professors.

My name is Wangjian. It’s really a great honor to have this opportunity to present my proposal to you. and my thesis is entitled “on the endogenous factors of junior school students’ English learning anxiety and the strategies of teacher s’ adjustment”. Now please allow me begin the introduction.

Part1. Theoretical Foundation of this research

In the history of educational research, cognition research was the most dominant theory in SLA, but the emotional part of learning was ignored so long.

With the advent of Humanistic psychology, foreign language educators and researchers have been paying attention to learners' "affective variables" in language learning. Humanistic psychology strongly claims that the importance of the inner world of the learners should be considered first, and the individual's thoughts, feelings and emotions should be put in the forefront of learners’development. Humanistic approaches have had a considerable influence on English teaching methodology. The main one is suggestopaedia developed by Lozanov. It focuses on the importance of the learning environment, which can minimize anxiety and enhance personal security. So a relaxing and cooperative atmosphere is necessary.

During the 1980s, the focal point of second language learning shifted from teacher-centering to learner-centering. With educators’awareness of the affective variables in foreign language learning, anxiety has been one of the hot issues. Krashen (1981) applies the idea of the Affective Filter to language learning and researches its influences on the rate of second language acquisition in three areas, that is, anxiety, motivation, and self-confidence. If a learner has higher anxiety, lower motivation, or lower self-esteem, the affective filter will be higher and does not provide the learner with as much "subconscious language acquisition". According to the model of Krashen, Anxiety may function as an "affective filter", which is like a screen that prevents a learner from acquiring all the input. The stronger the anxiety is, the less input a learner

will get and the less output he\she can produce.

In the past decades, more and more researches were done on the relationship between anxiety and foreign language learning, among which, Horwitz and Copes’ theoretical model of foreign language anxiety exerted great influence on later researches. For the first time, Horwitz and Cope defined Foreign language anxiety, and conceptualized the components of anxiety into three parts: communicative apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. In order to identify and measure foreign language anxiety efficiently, Horwitz and Cope(1986)made a reliable and valid tool of measuring anxiety, i.e. the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale(FLCAS). it is most widely used by many researchers such as Horwitz, Philips, Aida , Bailey and so on . They have found that there exist negative correlations between learning anxiety and learners’ achievement.

Part2. Significance ,Purposes , and Methodology of this research.

In 2001, the Ministry of Education issued English curriculum Criterion for Junior School which places great emphasis on students’ emotional elements in English teaching and learning. In addition, under the present examination and evaluation system, more and more students are losing interest in learning, some lack motivation, some are in short of self-confidence, What's worse, some students cut classes just because they are afraid of answering questions in class. All these show that students have considerable anxiety in English learning and learning anxiety is the dominant factor that obstructs the learning process.

Over the past years, there were numerous studies on students’ language learning anxiety, but most of them focused on either Western universities or high schools. Studies on Chinese students are rare, especially those targeting at junior school students. In China, students learn English mostly by attending formal school education and they have few opportunities to practice English out of class. Thus it’s quite often for them to encounter great obstacles in learning. This, in turn, will further increase their anxiety. Therefore, discussions on junior school students’English learning anxiety possess both theoretical significance and pragmatic value.

Since foreign language learning anxiety not only affects students’ language learning but also is considered to have more debilitating effects than facilitating effects, The first purpose of this study is to describe a general level of the foreign language anxiety of junior school students and to find out the nature of junior school students’ language anxiety by analyzing those data from questionnaires and interviews. The second purpose is to discuss how those factors, especially endogenous factors, such as self-efficacy, achievement motivation and negative attribution, contribute to English learning anxiety. The third purpose of the thesis is to put forward a list of strategies to cope with students' learning anxiety so as to improve English teaching.

For these purposes, The thesis starts by reviewing the previous and current research on anxiety both at home and abroad. Inspired by the previous researches, the author adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods. To perform the quantitative study, the author plans to use the FLCAS to measure the anxiety level of students in the No.3 middle school of Fanchang and the junior school of Suncun. I will select one class of each grade from the two schools. The whole FLCAS will be writen in Chinese, which contains 33 items. Each of item is answered on a 5-point scal, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree with a value from 1 to 5. Based on the data collected from questionnaire, the author is to explore the sources of the anxiety and the relationship between English learning Anxiety and proficiency.

In the qualitative study, about 5 typical teachers from the schools respectively are chosen to participate in interviews. From the interviews, the auther can get more details about the performance of learners’ anxiety and teacher s’ good attempts on reducing the learners’ anxiety. Based on the data obtained from both quantitative and qualitative studies, the author expects to obtain more supportive information and reach a deeper understanding in the interplay of different correlating factors in the development of language anxiety. All the raw scores obtained from the questionnaire are computed and processed by using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) for statistical analysis.