Anxiety In Chinese Oral Tests Among Foreign Students At The Elementary And Intermediate Levels

This paper aims to explore anxiety in Chinese language oral tests for students at elementary and intermediate level. We conducted the research for three questions as follows. First, it inspects the different anxiety levels among individuals with different backgrounds, as well as the reasons why they are different. Next we discuss anxiety caused by some kinds of questions commonly used in oral tests. Further we analyze the degrees of anxiety caused by these questions. Finally, we put forward some suggestions about questions designed for oral tests based on the findings, attempting to relieve students' anxious feeling but keep the high validity of the tests.The main anticipants in our study consist of 98 foreign students at elementary and intermediate level studying at Donghua University. The research uses the Chinese Oral Test Anxiety Questionnaire as the investigation tool designed by myself, including Chinese Language Oral Test Scale, background information questionnaire and some open-ended questions. Through analysis of data and small scope individual interview, we use SPSS to carry on the statistical analysis of the data collected.The study indicates that anxiety in oral tests is a common phenomenon, and the majority of learners keep medium degree of anxiety. There are some differences among learners while individual factors are taken into consideration, such as sex, nationality, time of learning, oral proficiency and self-appraisal. But the differences are not significant. (1) The female are slightly more anxious then the male, though there is no significant difference. (2) The Japanese and Korean get more anxious then their western companions. (3) The students having learned for one to two years are obviously less anxious than the ones for less then one year. (4) In terms of self-appraisal, there is significant difference between the students who think themselves just so-so and the ones who value themselves at a low level. The oral proficiency has no influence on the difference among anxiety degrees. Besides, we also find that lack of language skills, such as listening skill and vocabulary will lead to insufficiency of self-confidence. All of these are the main reasons causing oral test anxiety.Six questions are usually used in Chinese language oral tests. We make a comparison of them according to the anxiety degree they bring to the students. They are arranged in the degree order from high to low: topic expression > map-read speech > roll play > self-introduction > reading aloud.Through analyzing the anxiety caused by test questions, we find that some individual factors affect the anxious feeling significantly. (1) The female feel more nervous then the male. (2)The learners coming from Japan and Korea are more anxious then the ones coming from Europe and US. (3) The age is also an important factor. The older learners are, the more anxious they get. (4) The time of learning, self-evaluation and oral proficiency are not the factors causing the different anxiety degrees among students.At last, we offer some reasonable proposals, which may be helpful for the oral tests and oral teaching.