A Study About The State, Causes And Coping Styles Of Foreign Students' Chinese Learning Anxieties

Since 1970s, the focus of foreign language learning has shifted from the way that teachers teach to the way that students learn. It is more and more realized that the success of foreign language learning depends largely on the learner himself/herself. Karshen's Affective Filter Hypothesis suggests that learners are affected by affective factors in foreign language learning. A lot of researchers pointed out that anxiety is the most prefigurative affective factor to learners' achievements.In western countries the studies on language anxiety began in 1970s, with Scovel, Maclntyre, Gardner, Lambert, Horwitz and Young being the representatives. They have adopted a variety of methodologies and focused on the relationships between several different target languages and learners in different contexts. In China, English-teaching researchers such as Liu Runqing, Dai Manchun, Wang Yinquan and Lei Xiao, have introduced and used the related achievements in west for reference. Their studies are of great help for deepening language anxiety theory and promoting English teaching in China. In the domain of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, Qian Xujing, Zhang Li, Wang Biao and other scholars have studied the state of Chinese learning anxieties of foreign students, but the studies are not deep-going and all-sided enough. It is owing to this that the author studies foreign students' language anxieties in learning Chinese, so that there can be a better understanding about anxiety and foreign students' learning difficulties and problems in learning Chinese and we can provide some useful suggestions to teachers.With this in mind, the study focuses on four aspects, involving foreign students' different levels of Chinese learning anxiety, the effects of different individual differences on anxiety levels, the causes and the coping ways of Chinese learning anxieties.The subjects of this study are foreign students from East China Normal University, Shanghai Foreign Language University, Donghua University and Shanghai University of Engineering Science. The research includes both quantitative and qualitative studies. In the quantitative study, four questionnaires were designed to investigate foreign students' background information, their anxiety levels, the causes and coping ways of their anxieties. In the qualitative study, the students attended an interview to talk about their language anxieties. The result of the qualitative study is a complementarity to the quantitative study.The results show that firstly, foreign students are more or less interfered withChinese learning anxiety. To be more specific, about one third foreign students are distracted by strong Chinese learning anxiety in their learning and living. Secondly, the levels of foreign students' anxieties influenced by different genders, nationalities and subjective language competences, but not influenced by different ages, characters, hours of having learned Chinese and expectations of Chinese ability. Thirdly, foreign students' Chinese learning anxieties can be caused by many sources, such as classroom teaching activities, the communications between teachers and students, learning materials, classroom competitions, culture conflicts and language tests, and so on. The difficulty of Chinese itself owning to its uniqueness is the most important source of foreign students' anxieties. The sources of foreign students with different anxiety levels are different. Finally, most coping ways used by foreign students are mature, positive ones. The most in use coping ways of foreign students with different anxiety levels are not same, but the least in use coping ways are almost the same.Based on the above findings, the author makes three suggestions for teachers. Firstly, teachers should be aware of students' individual differences, adopt different teaching ways to different students. Secondly, teachers should try to induce the stress of the learning context, create a secure classroom atmosphere for foreign students. Thirdly, teachers should help students to obtain effective leaning strategi...