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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
Nowadays, more and more people begin to learn English not only because English is acompulsory course in the school but also English becomes a need for their future life. Withmore chances to communicate with foreigners, the English learners are more eager to improvetheir English speaking ability. Furthermore, in 2007, Chinese Education Ministry issued“College English Course Teaching Requirements” and pointed out that the teaching aim ofcollege English is to cultivate students’ English comprehensive ability, especially listeningand speaking skills in order to make students able to communicate effectively in English intheir future study, work and social activities. Therefore, the study of oral English teaching atpresent is particularly of great importance.The voice that college students should shake off “dumb English” is becoming louder andlouder(Wen Qiufang,1999). However, despite the louder voice for improving speaking ability,Chinese students still show awkwardness in speaking. They know well English grammar andwords and they can read and write but cannot speak effectively. For language learners, gettingfamiliar with the complicate structure of language without knowing how to connect theseparated words into a whole sentence and utter it fluently is rather like being able to tellabout the delicate mechanisms of a clock without knowing how to tell the time. At Englishclass, the teacher usually designs such activities as speech, dialogue, role-play, discussions etcto help the students use the language. Yet for the students with speaking anxiety, they fall intogreat trouble. Some of them are not so sure whether the topic given by the teacher is thefamiliar one, whether their language proficiency is high enough to meet the topic, whetherthey would be laughed by other students if they make errors. Students’ worries of course willdirectly result in their hesitation and unwillingness to speak and even keep silent.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
The study of anxiety in the language learning and use can be dated back to the1960s(Wang Fuying,2011). At the early stage, such notion as language anxiety or foreignlanguage anxiety did not exist until 1972. Anxiety is treated as an appendage to the researchof second language acquisition. In 1972, Spielberger proposed that anxiety can be classifiedinto trait anxiety and state anxiety. Chaistain(1975) examined the relation between traitanxiety, test anxiety and the grades of foreign language learning. Young (1986) investigatedthe effect of trait anxiety on spoken language. Although the studies of anxiety in this stagehave attracted foreign language educators’ attention, a clear relationship between anxiety andlanguage learning has not been confirmed in that no reliable and valid scale for measuring theanxiety has been created (Scovel,1978). Since 1986, researches both abroad and at home haveconducted amount of empirical studies to investigate the relationship between foreignlanguage anxiety and the foreign language achievement (Horwitz,1986; Qian Xuqing,1999;Zou Yan,2006). Meanwhile, the studies of language anxiety tend to the study its influence onthe four skills, such as: Chen Jie(1996), Yu Xinle(1999), Wang Xuemei(2001).Many studies made by Western researches have demonstrated that anxiety is negativelycorrelated with se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。