Anxiety About Reading In Chinese Among Foreign Students At The Preliminary Level

This study aims to explore reading anxiety in learning Chinese as a foreign language. It attempts to answer 3 broad questions: (1) Do the levels of reading anxiety vary according to overseas students' cultural background; (2) anxiety manifestations and other individual factors which influence reading anxiety; (3) How does anxiety influence other affective variables, time spent on reading, reading processes and outcomes.The study participants consisted of 87 preliminary overseas students at East China Normal University. Participants' two different anxiety levels were measured by the Chinese Reading Anxiety Scale, a newly modified scale based on Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale, and Chinese Classroom Anxiety Scale. The Reading Comprehension Task consisted of two Chinese passages each followed by comprehension and a Cloze Test. Three open-ended questions together with a background questionnaire were employed to further explore where anxiety occurs, and how anxiety intervenes in the reading process.The results indicate that Chinese reading anxiety vary by language distance. The Japanese students are the most anxious, followed by the Korean participants, with the western participants perceiving the lowest levels of anxiety. Unfamiliar scripts and writing systems are the main factors that elicit reading anxiety for the western students at the preliminary level, and unfamiliar cultural material and material features such as passage length and topic are most anxiety provoking for the Japanese and Korean students. Self-perceived reading ability, yielding interfering thoughts which hamper reading process, is significantly related to the anxiety level of an individual student. Reading anxiety has a negative relationship with the western students' reading achievement. In contrast, such correlation is not found for the Japanese and Korean students. Results from the correlation analyses revealed that reading anxiety influence both reading interest and time spent on reading. The strategy of "translation word by word "served as the predictor of poor reading performance and high level of reading anxiety. Open-ended questions showed that anxious students are sensitive to time constraints. After introducing the coping strategies used by the overseas student, teaching implications are offered to help them alleviating anxiety and make sense of what they read.