A Study On Chinese Students' Speaking Anxiety In Thai

Since1950s, the importance of emotional factors to second language learning is extensively focused by some language theorists. By the age of1980s, many views on relationship between affective variable and foreign language learning are identical, that is anxiety was regarded as one of the most important effective variables. However, in the domain of teaching Chinese as a second language, there are not many papers about anxiety.Based on research findings about foreign language teaching at home and abroad, this paper adopted questionnaire survey and individual interview. The combined investigation method is used in non-target language environment for Thailand’s Chinese learners. Questionnaires including "Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale","Chinese Speaking Anxiety Scale" and "Causes of Chinese Learning Anxiety Scale" are adopted into this research. All questionnaires were conducted by reliability testing, scale correlation scale, individual factor test, factor analysis and the mean test.The results show that Thai students are interfered with Chinese speaking anxiety, and there exists significant positive correlations between the Chinese Classroom Anxiety and Chinese Speaking Anxiety. Chinese Classroom Anxiety is inferior to Chinese Speaking Anxiety among Thai students, indicating that Thai students don’t speak so much in Chinese speaking class. Thai students’age and learning period for Chinese have effect on speaking anxiety. On the whole, the older the students are, the more anxiety they get;while the anxiety becomes weaker as the learning period for Chinese gets longer. From the observation of type distribution of the two scales, we conclude that the preparation of language form, the evaluation of the Chinese level and the master of communication ability all affect the speaking anxiety of Thai students. Thai students’ speaking anxiety also comes from learning content and materials, as well as communication between teacher and student through the analysis of the form Causes of Chinese Learning Anxiety Scale. Finally, on the basis of personal interviews, we summarize some suggestions about the study of Thai students speaking anxiety.