英语听力焦虑影响与认知能力研究（英文） .doc

the effect of anxiety on listening comprehension andcognitive performance in the english as a foreign language英语听力焦虑影响与认知能力研究abstractanxiety that accompanies a listening comprehension task has been found to be closely related to the acquisition of a foreign language. this study examined the effects of sex and years in school on the listening anxiety of 101 university-level efl students. also, it addressed how the listening anxiety affected their listening comprehension and cognitive performance. two instruments, called the foreign language listening anxiety scale and the cognitive interference questionnaire respectively, were used to assess the listening anxiety level and to measure the degree of interfering thoughts of each participant. the listening comprehension assessment consisted of a multiple-choice test. the results indicated that sex and years in school each did not have an effect on the foreign language listening anxiety. clear effects of anxiety on the students listening comprehension performance and their ability to concentrate on the task at hand were found in this study. highly anxious students, compared with their less-anxious counterparts, were more distracted by task irrelevant thoughts and were less able to focus on the task at hand, which in turn affected their listening comprehension performance. suggestions for future research are discussed. key words: efl students, cognitive performance, interfering thoughts, foreign language listening anxiety. acknowledgementthis research project lasting for one whole year has finally come to an end. over the past year, there have been some people we truly appreciate, and therefore we want to convey our deep gratitude and compliments to all of them. first, we feel an immense gratitude to our professor, dr. chen-hong li. we deeply appreciate his commitment to this research, and he always teaches us with patience during the meeting. so that in turn, were here to salute his dedication to the profession and for the personal sacrifices he has made to teach us over the past year. what is more, the accomplishment of the research project relies on the cooperation of all of us, and therefore we appreciate each member of our team for putting a lot of efforts to have this project completed. also, we appreciate those students that helped to fill out the questionnaire; this research would not have been possible without their great assistance.finally, all of our members sincerely appreciate those helping us and are willing to accept criticism and instruction with a modest heart. we hope results emerging from this research can bridge the gap between language theories and current classroom practice, benefit all foreign language instructors, and lead to further research in this field. thanks again to all of the people who have ever helped with this project. table of contentschapter pageone introduction1 review of literature3 sex, language proficiency and anxiety3 anxiety and l2 listening comprehension5 anxiety and cognitive performance6 purpose of the study8 two method9 participants9 instruments10 procedures11 data analysis12three results and discussion13 results for research question 113 discussion13 results for research questions 2 and 316 discussion17four suggestions for future research19five conclusion20references21appendix 1-foreign language listening anxiety scale (fllas)25appendix 2-reliability analysis of the fllas27appendix 3-cognitive interference questionnaire (ciq)30lists of tablestable page1 characteristics of study participants92 means, standardard deviations, and number for fllas as a function of sex and years in school153 two-way analysis of variance (anova) for fllas as a function of sex and years in school154 means and standard deviations for gept and ciq as a function of anxiety level165 effects of anxiety level (high and low) on gept and ciq17 - 32 -chapter oneintroductionin recent years, the importance of listening and speaking performance in the efl (english as a foreign language) classroom has been drawing researchers attention. it seems that listening and speaking skills are considered an index of a learners english communication ability. as a result, to foster students listening and speaking skills is an objective that efl teachers have been striving for together. krashen (1985) suggested that speaking not be taught directly or very early in the language classroom and maintained that speech would “emerge” once the acquirer has built up enough comprehensible input (i+1). although krashens claims have often been challenged, there is universal agreement among second language researchers that comprehensible input is closely related to learning a second language. given the importance of comprehensible input to a second language learner, research has found that language anxiety acts as an affective filer which makes the student unreceptive to such input (krashen, 1980). researchers divide the anxiety into two kinds: one is detrimental for learning, and the other is facilitative, but not necessarily helpful for students to get better grades (ying, 1993). yang (1993) found in a study of chinese learners of english a clear negative correlation between the learners levels of anxiety and their listening performance. aniero (1990) also noted that anxiety (called receiver apprehension in the study) correlated with poor listening performance when learners were engaged in pair interactions. others (ehrman & oxford, 1995; horwitz, 1990; scovel, 1978; spielmann & radnofsky, 2001; young, 1992) suggested the benefit of facilitative anxiety in the course of learning a foreign language. language learning is composed of five parts: listening, speaking, reading, writing and interpreting, which results in all kinds of anxiety, especially in speaking and listening situations (ying, 1993). these two types of anxiety occur constantly during conversation in all languages and settings. in communication theory, all participants are simultaneously sending and receiving messages. in this interactive process, each participant needs to be able to monitor his or her progress towards a goal(s) and to provide the other person with feedback. failure to establish interactive connections with ones interlocutors and to mutually move toward goals is considered face-threatening in most cultures, which contributes to the raising of anxiety and the lowering of self-confidence. buck (1992) and brindley (1998), in comprehensive surveys of institutional tests, have identified several factors that affect listening test performance, including nature of the input, nature of the assessment task, and individual listener factors. of the three, it is nature of the inputdialect, speech rate, background, amount of redundancythat often causes listeners anxiety. also, if students lack appropriate background knowledge to a listening passage, they could fail in examinations. most people think oral presentations, impromptus speeches and debates are the most important reasons that cause their anxiety, whereas group-oriented activities decrease the possibility of their anxiety (huang, 2007).english is viewed as a foreign language in taiwan, and people do not often use english for communication in their daily lives; hence, learning anxiety might continue to be an issue researchers are concerned about. as we are living in a global village, the enthusiasm for learning english might not fade away because english is an international language. in addition, english is a major subject in junior high school in taiwan. consequently, it is crucial for language teachers and language educators to be more involved in understanding the relationship between language anxiety and language performance and knowing how to manage listening anxiety in a more effective way than every before if students english listening proficiency is to be developed. the findings of this study will shed light on whether students levels of listening anxiety differ by sex and years in school. also, it will explore whether highly anxious students and less-anxious students are different in both their listening comprehension performance and the time that the two types of students experience in off-task preoccupations. review of literaturesex, language proficiency and anxiety.before we discuss what relationship there is between sex and listening anxiety, we should understand what “anxiety” means first. spieberger (1983) defined anxiety as the state of feeling nervous and worried. this definition also conforms to the affective involvement proposed by krashen, who stated that learners feel anxious when they can not comprehend the content of a listening passage. other research by oxford (1999) showed that there are two kinds of anxiety: harmful anxiety and helpful anxiety. the latter means that anxiety has some facilitative effect on learning, not necessarily acting as a negative factor in learning. for this reason, people might improve their english ability if they could turn negative attitudes (a lack of self-confidence, apprehension, fear, motivation) into positive ones by identifying the source of anxiety and seeking help.according to the study by chang (張寶燕,1999), a pre-test and post-test questionnaire was adopted to examine the degree of anxiety of all participants. it showed that there was no difference between male and female students in their level of anxiety. in this study, the students who had gone abroad in an english-speaking country had lower anxiety than those who had never been to a foreign country. hsu (徐玉婷, 2004) studied foreign language anxiety, efl learning motivation and strategy among students in a junior high school. the results indicated that there was no significant difference between male and female students in foreign language anxiety; however, the female students grades in extrinsic motivation and cognitive strategy were higher than those of the male students. in addition, foreign language anxiety was associated with efl learning motivation and strategy.the role played by anxiety has something to do with students performance in the foreign language classroom. horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) found that anxiety comes along in the learning process when the learners are engaged in the language learning activity. brown (2000) proposed that foreign language anxiety specifically belongs to the situational nature of state anxiety. however, no matter in which grade, students level of anxiety is different. most people think that more proficient students have lower anxiety in a listening task while less proficient students have a higher level of listening anxiety. following is a review on the relationship between years in school and students anxiety. yeh (葉靜宜, 1993) explored the english anxiety in senior high school students. a questionnaire was used to evaluate the students english learning anxiety. the results showed that the higher level students or more advanced students experienced a higher level of anxiety. a different perspective on the relationship of language proficiency to anxiety is found in wus (吳雅玲, 1998) study, in which the author, using a questionnaire, investigated the relationship among english language anxiety, efl learning motivation and strategy. all the participants in the study were junior high school students in southern taiwan. the results showed that there was no relationship between the second-year students and the first-year students in their anxiety level. elkhafaifi (2005) studied the effect of general foreign language (fl) learning anxiety on students achievement in an arabic course and listening anxiety on students listening comprehension. the results revealed that fl learning anxiety and listening anxiety tended towards the significant negative correlations on students achievement, and therefore demonstrated that students with higher listening anxiety had lower listening comprehension grades than students with lower anxiety. this study showed that there was no significant difference between listening anxiety among students, but there was a significant difference in their levels of learning anxiety that could be attributed to sex factor.as a result of the research reflecting a disparity between men and women in their anxiety level, and the strength of the relationship between language proficiency and listening anxiety remains unclear, the roles of sex and year in school in listening anxiety deserve further consideration. anxiety and l2 listening comprehension. anxiety plays an important role in second language development. according to krashens affective filter hypothesis, it claimed that the best acquisition will occur in environments where anxiety is low and defensiveness absent; therefore, interfering thoughts occur when the learner feels anxious, which results in a lack of concentration on the task. consequently, not only are the negative attitudes likely to prevent the learner to make use of input, but they also hinder the learners success in language learning.elkhafaifi (2005) studied the effect of general fl learning anxiety on students achievement in an arabic course and listening anxiety on students listening comprehension. the results revealed that fl learning anxiety and listening anxiety were negatively correlated with students achievement and that students with higher listening anxiety had lower listening comprehension grades than students with lower anxiety. similarly, liang (2007) examined the effect of anxiety on language achievement of college students in taiwan. the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) was allotted to 106 freshmen. the results indicated that high levels of anxiety lead to students lower exam scores. in addition, higher levels of anxiety could have harmful effects on students fl performance. students who have higher anxiety receive lower grades than students who have lower anxiety (bailey 1983; mills, pajares, & herron, 2006; onwuegbuzie, bailey, & daley1999; vogely, 1998). especially, students with anxiety lack motivation and self-confidence, and these negative feelings could hinder their performance in class (macintyre & clement, 1997). another important insight to be applied to our understanding of anxiety lies in the distinction between debilitative and facilitative anxiety (alpert & haber, 1960; scovel, 1978), or what oxford (1999) called “harmful” and “helpful” anxiety. recently, spielmann and radnofsky (2001) preferred to identify tension as a more neutral concept to describe the possibility of both “dysphoric” (detrimental) and “euphoric” (beneficial) effects in learning a foreign language. we may be inclined to view anxiety as a negative factor, something to be avoided at all costs. however, the notion of facilitative anxiety or euphoric tension over a task to be accomplished is a positive factor. otherwise a learner might be inclined to be “wishy-washy”, lacking that facilitative tension that keeps one poised, alert, and joust slightly unbalanced to the point that one cannot relax entirely. several studies have suggested the benefit of facilitative anxiety in learning foreign languages (ehrman & oxford, 1995; horwitz, 1990; spielmann & radnofsky, 2001; young, 1992). anxiety itself does not always have a bad effect on students. the study of alpert and haber (1960) inferred that anxiety could have a helpful effect to facilitate students performance. since students with higher anxiety are different from students with lower anxiety in their performance. as a result, we try to explore how anxiety affects english-major students performance in a listening task. specifically, we are going to explore the relationship between anxiety and listening comprehension performance and examine whether anxiety has a beneficial effect on students language performance or not.anxiety and cognitive performance.attention has been referred to all those aspects of human cognition that the subject can control (shiffrin, 1988). attention, however, is a limited capacity system and the notion of limited capacity is important in listening. although we humans can readily switch back and forth between different sources of information, only information in the attended channel can be remembered due to the constraints in our cognitive capacity. as a result, the degree of readiness to deal with incoming stimuli is a fundamental concept to be concerned about in the listening process.blankenstein, toner, and flett (as cited in sarason, pierce, & sarason, 1998) reported that high test-anxious students had more interfering thoughts, and these thoughts affected their performance on the tests compared with the low test-anxious students. on the cognitive interference questionnaire (ciq) items dealing with self-deprecatory and worry-laden thoughts, high test-anxious students had higher scores than low test-anxious students. researchers believe that attention to self and self-involvement is a key feature of anxiety state. when students cannot concentrate on listening to english, it means that they are distracted internally or externally, and this distraction may prevent them from absorbing the incoming information effectively. sellers (2000), from the analysis of the ciq, also reported that highly anxious students tended to experience more off-task preoccupations, that is, highly anxious students have more interfering thoughts than less-anxious students.according to the above-mentioned research, interfering thoug