Effect of Introducing Background Information on Chinese College Students English Listening Anxiety

Abstract

Foreign language students commonly have a wide range of hearing anxiety in listening examinations. Background information introduction is a teaching method applied in English listening teaching, namely, the teacher introduces background information of listening content before the listening. This study investigated how pre-teaching content affects the anxiety levels of college students at an University of China taking the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale(FLLAS) and college English CET-4 listening tests. Participants included 106 non-English major freshmen matched in listening ability. The instruments were conducting questionnaires based on the FLLAS and listening tasks given just before and after the experiment. It is concluded that the listening proficiency of foreign language learners (SL/FL) significantly affected their foreign language listening anxiety. Moreover, background information introduction, to a certain extent, may relieve FL learners foreign listening anxiety. This paper contributes to investigate the relationships between English listening anxiety and listening proficiency of the participants, inspiring future researchers to investigate more listening strategies to deal with FL listening anxiety.