A STUDY ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGICAL ANXIETY, SELF-EFFICACY AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING ACHIEVEMENT
Authors: Zhao Huimin 
Published: July 2022

Background

Psychological anxiety has always been regarded as an important factor affecting foreign language learning. Foreign language anxiety refers to the fear, resistance and tension in the process of foreign language learning. Students with foreign language anxiety disorder are usually reluctant to participate in learning activities. Foreign language self-efficacy is a kind of self-confidence in foreign language learning. Students with strong self-efficacy tend to actively participate in foreign language learning. So far, the relationship between foreign language anxiety, self-efficacy and foreign language achievement is not clear. At the same time, the relationship between foreign language anxiety and specific factors of self-efficacy remains to be discussed.

Participants and Methods

200 freshmen from Bohai University were selected to study the correlation between foreign language anxiety, self-efficacy and foreign language achievement. English final exam scores are used to divide participants into pass and fail groups. Both gender and major are considered as variables of foreign language achievement. This study includes four elements of self-efficacy: learning ability, courage to overcome challenges, effort and overcoming setbacks. 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.

Results

Our results showed that the anxiety level of the passing group was significantly lower than that of the failure group, and the self-efficacy level of the passing group was significantly higher than that of the failure group. 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. In order to test whether emotion has an impact on implicit aggression (IA), one-way ANOVA was carried out on IA. The results showed that the main effect of emotion was significant, f (2101) = 3.32, P = 0.040. Post hoc comparison showed that the anger group (M = 9.62, SD = 3.27) was significantly higher than the sadness group (M = 7.91, SD = 3.21, P = 0.045, Cohen'sd = 0.53) and the neutral emotion group (M = 7.62, SD = 3.85, P = 0.019, Cohen'sd = 0.56). Research shows that foreign language anxiety, gender and self-efficacy can be used as comprehensive variables to measure foreign language learning achievement. In learning, expression inhibition has a significant positive predictive effect on implicit positive emotion, and the interaction between interpersonal emotion regulation and regulation difficulty has a significant negative predictive effect on implicit positive emotion, indicating that expression inhibition plays a partial intermediary role in the impact of interpersonal emotion regulation on implicit positive emotion. The results of simple slope test showed that the mediating effect of expression inhibition was significant when m-1sd was taken as emotional regulation difficulty. The 95% confidence interval of bootstrap test was [0.01, 0.04], excluding 0. The mediating effect of expression inhibition was significant when m + 1sd was taken as emotion regulation difficulty. The 95% confidence interval of bootstrap test was [0.01, 0.05], excluding 0. The mediating effect of expression inhibition was significant at the high and low levels of regulation difficulty. The analysis of the direct effect on different levels of emotion regulation difficulty and the intermediary effect of expression inhibition shows that (Table 3), the direct effect of interpersonal emotion regulation tends to decrease with the increase of regulation difficulty, that is, with the decrease of regulation difficulty, interpersonal emotion regulation is more likely to directly affect implicit positive emotions. The mediating effect of expression inhibition increases with the increase of regulation difficulty, that is, with the increase of regulation difficulty, learning emotion regulation is easier to indirectly predict implicit positivity through expression inhibition.

Conclusion

This study shows that the current situation of English learning anxiety in group life is that most junior middle school students' English learning anxiety is at a medium level. Among the three kinds of anxiety: Communication fear, negative evaluation fear and test anxiety, the degree of communication fear is the highest, followed by test anxiety, and the degree of negative evaluation fear is the lowest. These three kinds of anxiety are theoretically higher than moderate anxiety. There are significant gender differences in Freshmen's English anxiety. The anxiety level of girls is significantly higher than that of boys. The high level of girls' foreign language learning self-efficacy and foreign language learning achievement can be attributed to two reasons: the characteristics of foreign language learning and the characteristics of girls. Because foreign language learning requires a lot of memory and recitation, girls have more perseverance and endurance than boys, which will naturally lead to better performance. This also explains why girls have much higher self-efficacy in foreign language learning than boys. Based on our research, we propose some effective strategies to alleviate foreign language learning anxiety. Although our study is based on a limited number of groups, it is statistically significant in studying the correlation between learning anxiety and academic achievement. In short, teachers should fully realize the important position of students' emotional factors in foreign language learning, actively improve teachers' role in teaching activities, pay special attention to their classroom language and behavior, and change from a single knowledge imparter to a classroom manager, coordinator and collaborator. In the process of teaching, we should actively and flexibly organize teaching activities according to the psychological characteristics of students, strive to create a loose and harmonious classroom atmosphere, and create a friendly and mutually beneficial emotion between teachers and students.

Acknowledgment

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