Intentional forgetting, anxiety, and EFL listening comprehension among Chinese college students

Intentional forgetting refers to impaired memory arising from an instruction to forget unwanted material. Intentional forgetting yielded with a list-method task is often interpreted as evidence for retrieval inhibition. This paper presents a study on the relationships among intentional forgetting, anxiety, and EFL listening comprehension among Chinese college students. Two experiments were conducted in which participants with different anxiety levels and EFL listening comprehension abilities finished list-method tasks of intentional forgetting with different experimental designs. The results indicated that intentional forgetting was negatively related to anxiety, but it bore no direct relation with EFL listening comprehension when the confounding effects of intentional remembering and anxiety were controlled. It is argued that the role of intentional forgetting in different learning activities should be considered in a domain-specific way and that certain strategies might be used to control emotions triggered in SL/FL learning.