A STUDY ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN COLLEGE STUDENTS' ENGLISH LISTENING ANXIETY AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT
Authors: Zhao Huimin 
Published: July 2022

Background

Since the 1970s, psychological anxiety has been regarded by linguistics and psychologists as one of the important factors affecting English learning achievement. Many scholars have done quantitative research on the relationship between anxiety and students' foreign language achievement. However, due to the different subjects and research tools, the conclusions on the relationship between anxiety and listening performance are inconsistent, especially on the relationship between debilitating anxiety and listening performance. In order to clarify the relationship between anxiety and listening anxiety and find out the main factors leading to students' anxiety, we used questionnaire survey and SPSS 19 statistical software to study the English listening anxiety of Non-English Majors in Bohai University.

Subjects and Methods

The subjects were 120 non-English majors in Bohai University, including 48 males and 12 females. We use Kim's foreign language listening anxiety scale as the measurement scale, and use Likert scoring method to evaluate the scale. Pearson correlation, standard deviation and statistical significance were used to illustrate the correlation. Independent sample t-test was used to verify the difference between high anxiety group and low anxiety group. According to the statistical value of anxiety, participants were divided into three groups: low, medium and high anxiety groups. The questionnaire includes two kinds of anxiety, namely debilitating anxiety and promoting anxiety. Through t-test, univariate and multivariate analysis of variance and regression analysis, we investigated the relationship between foreign language anxiety, self-efficacy and academic achievement of students of different majors and genders.

The study found that compared with the male group, the female group's foreign language achievement and self-efficacy level are much higher. However, there was no significant difference in anxiety levels between men and women. In addition, the study also found that foreign language anxiety was negatively correlated with foreign language achievement. Similarly, there is a significant negative correlation between foreign language anxiety and self-efficacy. State anxiety, trait anxiety and foreign language learning anxiety are positively correlated. The anxiety component of learners' personality characteristics plays an important role in the generation of foreign language learning anxiety. Research shows that foreign language anxiety, gender and self-efficacy can be used as comprehensive variables to measure foreign language learning achievement. Regression analysis showed that interpersonal emotion regulation had a significant positive predictive effect on explicit positive emotion (β= 0.29, P &lt; 0.001, 95% CI [0.27, 0.32]), that is, the body effect of learning emotion regulation on explicit positive emotion is significant. Then, model 4 in SPSS macro compiled by Hayes (2013) was used to test the mediating effect of expression inhibition between interpersonal emotion regulation and explicit positive emotion under the control of gender and age. The results showed that interpersonal emotion regulation significantly positively predicted expression inhibition (β= 0.14, P &lt; 0.001, 95% CI [0.13, 0.16]), interpersonal emotion regulation and expression inhibition predict explicit positive emotion at the same time (β= 0.22, P &lt; 0.001, 95% CI [0.20, 0.25]) and expression inhibition (β= 0.46, P &lt; 0.001, 95% CI [0.38, 0.54]) had significant predictive effect. The corrected bootstrap test showed that the mediating effect of expression inhibition was significant, the indirect effect value was 0.07, 95% CI [0.05, 0.09], and the mediating effect accounted for 24.14% of the total effect.

Results

Our results showed that although there was a positive correlation between promoting anxiety and English listening performance, it was not statistically significant (P &gt; 0.05). Among the students' psychological anxiety, debilitating anxiety dominated, and the results were statistically significant (P &lt; 0.01). This means that debilitating anxiety can be used as an indicator to measure the level of group anxiety. The results show that there is a negative correlation between listening anxiety and listening performance. Pearson correlation in high anxiety group was significantly higher than that in low anxiety group. This shows that students with poor English level are more likely to be anxious than students with good English level. Independent sample t-test confirmed that there was significant difference in debilitating anxiety between the two groups (P &lt; 0.01), but there was no significant difference in promoting anxiety (P &gt; 0.05).

Conclusion

Our results show that college freshmen generally have anxiety in English listening tests. Weakening anxiety rather than promoting anxiety has a negative impact on students' English listening performance. The higher the degree of anxiety, the lower the students' English listening level. The tension that leads to students' anxiety can be attributed to the following factors: insufficient examination preparation, lack of listening skills and background knowledge, lack of self-confidence and the difficulty of listening materials. Although our research is based on a small number of freshmen, its research on anxiety related listening performance is statistically significant. I hope it will be helpful to our research in the future.

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the fund from Education Department of LiaoNing Province (No. WQ2020008).