The Predictive Power of Anxiety on IELTS Speaking Performance 焦虑因素对雅思口语成绩的预测力文献综述

 2022-01-04 20:32:20

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文献综述

1. Introduction1.1 Research backgroundIn recent years, English competence has become one of the most significant metrics to evaluate individual competitiveness due to the tide of globalization. However, Chinese English teaching methods have always been criticized over the past years because Chinese students have Dumb English generally, and high mark but poor ability almost becomes a codeword of Chinese English learners. The students oral performance in different English tests is not satisfactory. Researchers have studied on the factors which influence English oral performance and found that anxiety is a very common psychological condition among students. It is revealed that about 15% to 20% of American college students have excessive anxiety when taking exams(Thomas, Cassady, Finch, 2018). Anxiety has been troubling numerous students for a long time, and Excessive anxiety is likely to cause serious harm to the physical and mental health of individuals. Anxious students will have a strong feeling of worry in the face of important situations, and then produce emotional reactions. For example, they will always worry about others evaluation of them, the failure of the exam or the ranking of the exam (Zeidner, 1998). Oral English anxiety has recently been a hot topic in English language teaching. Researches on oral English anxiety mainly fall into the following two categories: the correlation between oral English anxiety and oral English learning, and the causes of oral English anxiety. Some researchers (Young, 1991; Philips, 1992) have proved that appropriate anxiety is conducive to the improvement of students oral ability, and too high or too low anxiety has a negative impact on students oral expression. In the past years, the IELTS speaking performances of Chinese examinees were below expectation. According to official statistics, the speaking average of Chinese test takers ranked in the worst 10. However, in the written exams including listening, reading and writing, Chinese students got satisfactory results, purporting to their solid foundation of grammar and vocabulary knowledge. The IELTS speaking test is a special type of communication in which the examinee should talk with the examiner, a native speaker, in English face to face. IELTS speaking test system makes its unique, where a vividly interactive communication between examiners and candidates is required. Effective responding and opinion exchanging are valued during the test. When faced with a real human interlocutor and assessor, the psychological activities of those candidates can be very complicated. It is easy for such pressure to transform into test anxiety. Thus, its a worthwhile subject to study to find out the role that anxiety plays in IELTS speaking test based on Krashens affective filter hypothesis. However, few studies are especially related to examinees anxiety during IELTS speaking test. In such case, the influence of anxiety in the IELTS oral tests and the mechanism of such effect are worth pondering and studying. Therefore, this research intends to find the correlation between test anxiety and IELTS speaking test performance to provide several pedagogical suggestions for teachers and learning strategies for examinees. 1.2 Research purposesThis study aims to conduct an empirical study on the influence of anxiety, an affective factor, on examinees IELTS speaking performance so as to explore what this affective factor may expedite or fetter the improvement of examinees oral English proficiency. Based on the analysis of the results, the researcher intends to put forward some potent approaches to enhance catalytic aspects and eliminate passive aspects in examinees performance, with a view to developing satisfactory oral English competence for all IELTS examinees. 2. Literature review2.1 Theoretical frameworksAnxiety is one of the affective factors mentioned in the affective filter hypothesis, one of Krashens theories of second language acquisition, which are of paramount importance in English teaching. Precisely, Krashens theoretical constructs regarding second-language acquisition appeared in the latter 1970s. Krashens theories are in conformity with the working premises of researchers who investigated the role of comprehension in second-language learning in the previous decade.The affective filter hypothesis determines on a daily basis what actually happen in the second language classroom. Concept of the affective filter is much less controversial, and valid for nearly all language teaching methodologies. Krashen (1982) presents that the affective variables of motivation, self-confidence and anxiety have a profound influence on language acquisition (not learning). The claim of the natural approach is that students will acquire second languages best when they are in an environment which provides a maximally low (weak) affective filter. The affective Filter hypothesis shows that negative emotion has a negative effect on language learners ability to learn a new language such as unhappiness, fear and embarrassment. On the contrary, some positive emotions could have a positive impact such as self-confidence, happiness, motivation, on second language acquisition. With the development of anxiety study, Zeidners theories detailed the mechanism of it, proving that test anxiety is dynamic, pretty complex. His transactional model of test anxiety is one of the most widely used tool when talking about the production of test anxiety.Zeidner (1998) proposes a most recent authoritative anxiety theory in 1998, together with a transactional model of anxiety. He further enriches the definition of anxiety as the set of cognitive, affective and behavioural reactions that accompany concern over possible negative consequences contingent upon performance in a test or evaluative situation. The integrative transactional model that he proposes conceptualizes the phenomenon as a dynamic process involving the reciprocal interaction of a number of distinct elements at play, including evaluative context, individual differences in vulnerability, threat perception, appraisals and reappraisals, state anxiety, coping patterns and adaptive outcomes (Zeidner, 1998). He also points out that the whole process is interactive between the test-taker and the environment. This model presents a scientific and systematic process of test anxiety, demonstrates the influence of different variables and confirms the effect of evaluative context for the first time, initiating a new era for TA mechanism study. 2.2 Definitions of anxiety Although test anxiety has been discussed for more than a century, it is still difficult to define it. Kierkegaard (2002), a philosopher in the field of existentialist philosophy, first mentions the definition of anxiety in his book The concept of fear. In the book, he argues that anxiety is the irrational experience of free choice caused by the inability to anticipate the dangers that lurk beyond a new path. Subsequently, Freud, the representative of psychoanalysis school, and Miller and Dolard of behaviourism respectively studies anxiety from different perspectives. However, psychologists of different schools find it difficult to achieve a precise definition of anxiety because the range of explicit behavioural characteristics and complex introspective feelings that cannot be touched is too wide (Scovel, 1978). From different researches of the definition of anxiety, different foreign scholars believe that there are three main types of anxiety: trait anxiety, situational anxiety and state anxiety. Trait anxiety is an aspect of ones personality, a persistent tendency to be anxious; situational anxiety refers to the anxiety generated in some specific situations such as tests, and state anxiety is the combination of trait anxiety and situational anxiety (MacIntyre Gardnar, 1994), individuals who have the high level of trait anxiety are prone to be more anxious in the situations mentioned in situational anxiety. However, from the perspective of state anxiety, we cannot infer the specific reason of ones anxiety. Therefore, state anxiety remains to be explored.With the in-depth research on anxiety, more and more people have realized that anxiety, as one of the affective factors, has significant effects on foreign language learning. Therefore, the study on foreign language anxiety has been favoured by many scholars. Since the 1980s, the study of foreign language anxiety has made great progress on the basis of cognitive theory.Different scholars try to define foreign language anxiety from different angles. According to Aida (1994) , foreign language anxiety is unique to the process of language learning, and is characterized by obvious worries and fears about self-awareness, beliefs, feelings and behaviours related to language learning in the classroom. Macintyre Gardnar (1994) define foreign language learning anxiety as the feeling of tension and fear that has a special relationship with the foreign language context (including listening, speaking and learning). Horwitz (1986) takes the lead in the study of foreign language anxiety as an independent and different phenomenon from other anxiety feelings during language learning. They believe that foreign language anxiety is a complex of students self-perception, belief and feeling behaviour in foreign language classroom learning. Horwitz (1986) believes that foreign language classroom anxiety is a strong expectation of the distress of learners who make special efforts but are unable to do anything about the target language. In 1986, Horwitz et al design the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), including 33 items, which are used to analysis the main factors leading to anxiety in language classroom. Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) is prevalent and adopted in many studies to measure the level of foreign language anxiety. For the reason that the FLCAS is very important, Horwitz, (2001) pays attention to find out the potential connection between anxiety and language achievement by use it wildly in many studies. (Horwitz, 2001) The items include some vital questions which mean to analyse the sources of anxiety in different aspects. The scale is consisting of some personal speculation of the students to influence the different degree of the foreign languages anxiety. It consists of three dimensions: fear of communication, Anxiety of examination and fear of negative evaluation. Communicative fear refers to anxiety characterized by worry and anxiety when communicating with others. Test anxiety refers to the behaviour anxiety caused by the fear of examination failure. And negative fear of evaluation refers to the fear of others evaluation, the avoidance of evaluation occasions, and the expectation that others will make negative evaluations on them. This study takes Horwitz's definition of anxiety as the theoretical basis, and also uses Horwitz's FLCAS scale as the measurement scale of oral anxiety.The definition of foreign language anxiety and the influence of foreign language anxiety on foreign language learning have not reached a consistent conclusion. However, although the research focus and results are not consistent, a large number of studies still show that foreign language anxiety has a lot of negative effects on foreign language learning. 2.3 Previous empirical studies on the correlation between anxiety and English oral performancePreviously, there has been no lack of empirical researches on the link between anxiety and English oral proficiency. Since this study aims to explore one aspect of foreign language anxiety, oral English anxiety, it is necessary to review the research on foreign language learning anxiety and its correlation with foreign language oral proficiency. Scholars at home and abroad pay special attention to students listening anxiety and oral anxiety in the study of foreign language anxiety. This may be due to the particularity of language learning, whose ultimate goal is to learn to use the language flexibly.Krashen (1982), a foreign scholar, conducted a study on learners anxiety in foreign language class and found that the more anxious the students were, the worse their oral English level was. Young (1991) studied the relationship between language learning anxiety and oral English proficiency among college students learning different languages, and found that there was a great correlation between the two, and anxiety would hinder the improvement of students oral English proficiency. Philips (1992) also used the Foreign language classroom anxiety questionnaire to study the relationship between students oral English level and anxiety level, which was consistent with Youngs conclusion that oral English level was negatively correlated with anxiety level. There are also many researches on the relationship between foreign language learning anxiety and oral English proficiency in China. Chinese scholar Chen (1997) divided anxiety into two types: personality type and environment type, and found that both of them had significant and negative impacts on students oral English, with the latter having a greater impact. Subsequently, increasing researchers began to focus on oral anxiety. Cheng et al. (2007) discussed the relationship between anxiety and oral expression of non-English majors, and found that their level of foreign language anxiety was high, and classroom anxiety was negatively correlated with students oral expression ability. Gao (2010) investigated the status of oral English anxiety in high schools, and found that the level of oral English anxiety of high school students in rural schools was significantly higher than that of students in urban schools, and the degree of oral English anxiety of students in English class was negatively correlated with their oral performance.In IELTS speaking tests, the face-to-face, one-on-one communication poses much pressure on examinees and makes them much more anxious. When faced with a real human interlocutor and assessor, the psychological activities of those candidates can be very complicated. It is easy for such pressure to transform into test anxiety. Therefore, how test anxiety influences the IELTS speaking test performance is worth discussing.

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