An Investigation Into Chinese College Students’ Strategies To Regulate Their Foreign Language Learning Anxiety

Scholars have intensively investigated the foreign language learning anxiety in the pastdecades with fruitful and beneficial findings. However, few researchers have studied howstudents themselves use strategies to deal with their foreign language learning anxiety. Thepresent research intends to investigate how Chinese college students handle their foreignlanguage learning anxiety. A scale named Foreign Language Learning Anxiety RegulatingStrategy Inventory was developed with Cognitive Therapy and the theory of learningstrategy, particularly Oxford’s, used as the theoretical guideline. Besides, the researcher’spersonal experience in learning and teaching English and the feedback from interviews withcollege students have also been resorted to.The survey data from745college students have been analyzed and the results showedthat the questionnaire has a good validity and reliability. Finally,24items remained in thescale which consists of six factors, namely the Avoidance Strategy, the Rational ThinkingStrategy, the Affective Strategy, the Metacognitive Strategy, the Correct Cognition Strategyand the Positive Mental Suggestion Strategy. Descriptive analysis was used to obtain ageneral understanding of Chinese college students’ employment of foreign languagelearning anxiety regulating strategy. Independent T-tests were conducted to probe into thedifferences between male and female students. One-way ANOVA was carried out toexamine the differences among students of low-, medium-, and high-level anxiety. The mainresults are as follows:(1) Students were able to take the initiative to use various strategies to cope with theirforeign language anxiety. Among the six strategies categorized above, they used theAvoidance Strategy the most and the Metacognitive Strategy the least.(2) There were significant gender differences in the use of anxiety-regulating strategies. Overall, the female students reported a higher level of anxiety than male students did andused anxiety-regulating strategies more frequently than their male counterparts.(3) The frequency of strategy use decreased with the increase of students’ anxiety level.With respect to the frequency of using the Avoidance Strategy and the Rational ThinkingStrategy, the difference between the high-, medium-and low-level anxiety groups weresignificant.This research is meaningful and beneficial both theoretically and practically. Since it isnecessary to understand how students themselves cope with their foreign language anxiety,the present study contributes to the field of language anxiety study by developing a newscale named Foreign Language Learning Anxiety Regulating Strategy Inventory, which hasa good reliability and validity. So far, no such scale has been published from home andabroad. Besides, this study is a cross-disciplinary research. Elements from psychologyresearch have been integrated, for instance, the Cognitive Therapy Theory, as a theoreticalguideline, and a multitude of items borrowed. In addition, a great deal of psychologicaltheories were used to provide solid explanations to some of the results. Lastly, from thepractical perspective, the findings of this research can give English teachers a betterunderstanding on how college students deal with their foreign language learning anxiety,and accordingly, the teachers can improve their teaching methods, as well as give moreeffective and valuable instructions to students, which may create more opportunities toimprove students’capacities to use language anxiety regulating strategies more successfully.Finally, this study can also shed some light on the future study in this field.