One of the factors comes into great notice is that teachers’ feedback in class. Teachers’ feedback in class including the positive ones to students’ correct answer such as affirmation, praise and the negative feedback like error correction is a kind of a subsequent reaction to students’ class performance. Teaching feedback in class, especially the negative ones as error correction asks for great attention. Error correction, whose aim is to improve the students’ attention level to the differences between their language output and target language, and enhance the ability of their expression and degree of accuracy, has been a bone of contention, because of its forms as well as its effect. The value and ways of error correction in foreign language class should be further studied in order to make the students in a moderate state of anxiety for the development of their language learning. Error correction, not only its forms but also its time, teachers’ expressions, different situations and other details should all be well observed. What’s more, the learners, as the subject of the anxiety, may often be neglected by researchers. Thus the study will process mainly from the students’ perspective to well show the change of their learning anxiety toward class error correction.
1.2 Purpose and Significance
In the current situation of humanism education, the school education has paid more and more attention to the students’ inpidual dynamic role in the learning process and the effect of students' emotional factors in their study. New National English Curriculum Standard has set up the content and goal of the course, in addition to the language knowledge and language skills, affect, learning strategies and cultural understanding are also listed, which is a kind of innovation in the development of our English course reform, and embodies the "people-oriented" education idea. In foreign language teaching, attention should be paid to the use of the positive emotional factors that affect students’ learning; teachers should cultivate students' interest in learning, and reduce students' learning anxiety. All the arrangements, behaviors and feedback of the teacher in class should serve this purpose.
The purpose of this study is to better understand the junior school students’ English learning anxiety, for emotional factors including anxiety can always contribute to the development of students’ English learning. And students often regard the corrective feedback from the teacher as important. Therefore the study on the correlation between learning anxiety and error correction in class is significant which can beneficial to both students’ English learning and teacher’s teaching, and the building of a good relationship between them as well.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Definition of Learning Anxiety
Horwitz, an American psychologist, first defined foreign language anxiety as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to class-room language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” in 1986. (Horwitz, Horwitz, &Cope, 1986:125).In his theory of FLA, which has been widely used in FLA research, Horwitz have conceptualized FLA as a unique type of anxiety specific to foreign language learning.
As for the types of anxiety, Alpert and Haber thought that class anxiety can be cut into two kinds concerning the relation between anxiety and English class teaching: the facilitating anxiety and the debilitating anxiety. The former one encourages learners to finish the new learning tasks, and prompt them to work more hard to overcome the emotion of anxiety; while the latter makes learners to escape the learning tasks to avoid the anxiety. The point of view is basically consistent with the cognition of the intensity of anxiety. It is that the low anxiety is corresponding to the facilitating anxiety with facilitation and the high anxiety to the debilitating anxiety with inhibition effect. Although, the high anxiety is more common during the foreign language learning that hinders learners’ learning process. So it is said that learning anxiety is inversely associated with language ability (Williams, &Burden, 1997&Horwitz, & Cope, 1986: 125-132). 中学生英语学习焦虑与课堂纠错关系的研究(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_48434.html