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1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the study
With the aim to make the elementary English education meet the demand of theeconomic construction and the development of China, ministry of education drewup the national standard of English for full-time education andsenior middle school at the beginning of the 21stcentury.https://www.51lunwen.org/languagethesis/ The standard was published byBeijing Normal University Press on July 1st, 2001. It is clearly stated in the standard thatthe overall objective of the English curriculum reform of the elementary education is todevelop students’ comprehensive language abilities on the base of the integraldevelopment of students’ language skills, language competence, affect and attitudes,learning strategies and cultural awareness. According to this standard, affect andattitudes are very important factors in the teaching process.Early in the 1980s, the American linguist Stephen Krashen (1982) has alreadynoticed the importance of affect and he put forward the Affective Filter Hypothesiswhich emphasizes that high anxiety interferes with the process of a second language.Horwitz (1986) defined foreign language anxiety as the self-evaluation, cognition, affectand behavior during language learners’ learning process. Then he classifies foreignlanguage anxiety into three aspects: fear of communication apprehension, test anxietyand fear of negative evaluation. Early in the 1990s Birenbaum and Nasser (1994) havenoticed the problem that test anxiety is spread in schools all over the world.Nowadays, test anxiety has become a psychological problem which needs tobe solved among the students in the modern society. It is not surprising that tests haveemerged as potential anxiety-evoking stimuli, and test anxiety has become a prevalentcontemporary problem (Sarason, 1959; Spielberger & Vagg, 1995). Test anxiety isclosely related with students’ personality, the experience of failure, learning habit andalso the frequent tests during their learning process. Therefore, it is of great importanceto let the students get to know their anxiety and help them find proper and effectiveways to adjust their motivation, attitude and mood so that they can make progress in theprocess of learning English.

1.2 Significance of the study
In the recent years, researches on English test anxiety appeared one after another.For example, Zeng Xiangfa and Wang Xuecheng (2003) surveyed and counter measuredon medical college students’ CET-4 test anxiety; Han Wenfang and Li Yanglong (2005)studied the college students’ anxiety in oral English proficiency test; Zeng Li (2008)analyzed sports university students’ English test anxiety and also gave propersuggestions; Hua Liang and Chen Pingping (2010) conducted an empirical study onalleviating English major students’ listening anxiety. However, most of them areconducted on college students and primary students. Little attention was paid to thejunior middle school students, especially students in the rural area. This is unfavorableto the growth of the students and their learning process. The present study is conductedon the rural junior middle school students in north Jiangsu province to get an overallunderstanding of their anxiety, the relevant factors and also tries to give somesuggestion for alleviating such anxiety. It will certainly contribute to the development ofthe students’ English abilities. The results of the study are expected not only to behelpful to the students but also本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。