A Survey Of Chinese Learners’ Reading Anxiety

Humanistic educators Maslow and Rogers attach great importance to emotional factors in teaching.Maslow also puts forward human emotional needs in his hierarchy of needs theory.Later,there are more and more research and Exploration on emotional factors.As a common emotional factor,anxiety will have a far-reaching impact on learners’ language learning process.On the basis of sorting out and summarizing previous research results,mainly on the basis of the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,through questionnaires and student interviews with high reliability and validity,and takes 217 foreign students from Yunnan University and 29 foreign students from Confucius Institute in Liege as subjects to explore their Chinese Reading Anxiety and specific reasons.The results show that: first,the subjects do have anxiety in the process of Chinese reading,and nearly 85% of the subjects have medium to high degree of reading anxiety,most of the subjects have high interest and enthusiasm in Chinese reading and Chinese culture;Second,age,grade and nationality have significant influence on Chinese reading anxiety;Weekly Chinese reading time has significant influence on different dimensions;Gender,major,HSK level and duration of Chinese learning have no significant influence on Chinese reading anxiety and other dimensions,but there are significant differences in Chinese learning motivation and interested article types among subjects of different genders.Third,the Chinese reading anxiety of European and American students is significantly lower than that of Southeast Asian students,and the degree of interest in Chinese culture and the identification of thinking mode of European and American students are significantly higher than that of Southeast Asian students,but both of them have bottom-up reading habits.Fourth,serious word barriers,lack of Chinese reading confidence,limited time reading,high performance expectations,changes in teaching methods(online teaching),lack of background culture and knowledge,related to the text of grammar,rhetoric,unfamiliar topics,article length is the main factor causing Chinese reading anxiety;Fifthly,online teaching,due to its separation from the target language environment and the influence of the network situation,will lead to the decline of the overall Chinese level and reading ability,thus forming more serious anxiety of learners.Finally,in view of the problems of the subjects,combined with the actual situation,this paper gives constructive suggestions for learners and teachers to deal with Chinese reading anxiety from three aspects: text factors,reader factors and reading process.First,from the perspective of learners themselves,they should enhance their Chinese level and reading ability,read more and practice more,reasonably rely on their mother tongue,and learn to cultivate reading thinking at the same time,Proficient in bottom-up and top-down reading,and exercise good psychological quality;From the perspective of teachers,it is necessary to help students improve their ability to deal with anxiety sources,improve the teaching methods and content of reading classes,and reasonably teach reading strategies.