The Relationship between Foreign Language Anxiety and Self Attributions of Vocational High School Students

• Main Authors: Shih-Yuan Shao, 邵士原
• Other Authors: Eva Salazar
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/81287895271712529591

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用英語學系碩士在職專班 === 101 === For many years, research has been devoted to the studies of students’ attributions and foreign language anxiety in English learning. This present study aimed to investigate the relationships between foreign language anxiety and self attributions for success and failure in English learning among Taiwanese vocational high school students. Gender and parents’ educational level were identified as variables. Nine intact classes of 392 vocational high school students in northern Taiwan participated the study. Chinese versions of a) a questionnaire developed by Gobel and Mori’s(2007), based on Weiner’s three-dimensional framework of attribution, and b) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz et al., 1986) were used to collect data. The quantitative analysis of questionnaires was conducted through descriptive analysis, statistical tests in order to indicate direction and the relationship between the variables. Results of this study showed that students’ attributions for success are higher than those of failure. In terms of students’ attributions for success, task difficulty, which is an external factor of attribution, is the most important factor of concern. According to attributions for failure, the most concerned factor is teacher’s English ability. The students tended to ascribe their success to some concerned internal factors, but ascribe their failure to some external factors. There is no significant difference between males and females in both internal and external attributions. Finally, the difference of parental educational level is not significant in students’ learning attributions. The results of students’ foreign language anxiety showed that test anxiety is the higher construct of English anxiety. The highest level among all factors of FLCAS is “I get depressed when I don’t understand what the teacher is correcting”, which is categorized to be communication apprehension In terms of gender differences, the levels of males are higher than those of females, and there are gender differences of communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative social evaluation. Finally, the parental education background difference of communication apprehension is significant, but there are no significant differences of test anxiety and fear of negative social evaluation between students whose parental education levels are different.