The Comparative Research On German University Students' Beliefs About Their Chinese And English Learning

Nowadays, in the field of foreign language and second language acquisition, the researchers are paying more and more attention to the learners and their emotional features. And the beliefs about foreign language learning are extensively attached importance by researcher recently.This study, based on the domestic and foreign theory about beliefs of foreign language learning, makes a comparison and correlation on German university students' beliefs about Chinese and English learning.The study chooses the students of four grades in Economic Chinese major, Hochschule Bremen as objective, depending on questionnaire and interviews, makes scientific qualitative and quantitative analysis with the SPSS 11.5 software. It analyses German university students' beliefs about Chinese and English learning and explain the conclusion from the view of related theories, such as cognitive psychology, sociology and education.The focus of the study includes:1) The features of German university students' beliefs about Chinese and English learning and the same& difference between the two kinds of beliefs.2) The change of German students' beliefs about Chinese learning from the grade one to grade four.3) The correlation between the two beliefs.The study shows, as a whole, there is a significant difference between German university students' beliefs about Chinese and English learning. The differences include: 1)On the beliefs of language difficulty, German students think Chinese is much more difficult than English and the four language skills of Chinese (reading\listening\writing\speaking)are all the challenges.2)On the beliefs of the nature of language learning, German students hold the different opinions on the focus of learning Chinese(translation) and learning English(vocabulary) and agree the distance between German and Chinese is much farer than it between German and English.3)0n the beliefs of foreign language aptitude, the view that German are good at learning English, but not Chinese is strongly supported.4)On the beliefs of learning and communication strategies, the differences between two beliefs on the tolerance towards language error, the use of auxiliary and the guess strategies are obvious.5)On the beliefs of motivation and expectations, German students think now the chance of using English is more than Chinese and German think English is more important than Chinese in the present stage. However, German students think the master of Chinese is very important to find a good job and they want to take advantage of Chinese to know more about Chinese people and its society.With the rise of grade, German students beliefs about Chinese learning are changing and after analyzing the correlation of German students beliefs of English and Chinese learning, we can find that both the distance between German,English,Chinese and the degree of English use have influence on the correlation of two beliefs. In addition, the higher the grade is, the less the influence on beliefs about Chinese learning by the beliefs about English learning is.In the end, this study offers some effective strategies in some aspects such as curriculum,textbook,culture teaching,teaching skills, etc., which may be helpful for the Chinese teachers in the teaching practice in Germany.