The Effect Of Learners' Anxiety On Oral Fluency Of Foreign Learners Of Chinese

Oral proficiency of foreign learners of Chinese is measured against four standards: accuracy, fluency, complexity, and diversity. This research focuses on how learners' anxiety levels in the classroom and test anxiety levels affect the aforementioned oral proficiency marker. This study adapted and used the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and a background demographic questionnaire to measure learners' anxiety levels. A sum score of all questions determined each learner's anxiety level, and a sum score of test-specific questions determined each student's test anxiety level. Information collected from these surveys was cross-referenced against the oral corpus of the Institute for International Students at Nanjing University. Of the 270 questionnaires collected from foreign students with different Chinese proficiency levels at Nanjing University,76 matched directly with the university's corpus, and hence are used as testing samples. Cool Edit Pro 2.1 was used to analyze the transcribed recordings from the Nanjing University corpus. Based on the transcription and data, the five-measure standards of oral fluency were calculated, including speech rate, average length of pause, average duration of speech, number of syllable correction per hundred syllables, and the ratio of pruned syllables to total syllables. The first three standards are temporal indicators, whereas the last two are proficiency indicators. The data collected from the surveys were processed by paired T Test and Regression, using STATA 13 software. Three methods were used to divide the high-anxiety group and low-anxiety group, including Mean Value+/-Standard Deviation,25% percentile and 75% percentile, and mean value.The results of this study show that there is a significant difference using T Test in the average length of pause between high-level anxiety students and low-level anxiety students when they are grouped by Mean Value+/-Standard Deviation. The overall anxiety level positively correlates with the average length of pause. All three grouping methods show that the overall anxiety level positively correlates with speech rate and the number of syllable corrections per hundred syllables, while it negatively correlates with the average duration of speech. The test anxiety negatively correlates with the average length of pause and average duration of speech, while it positively correlates with the number of syllable corrections per hundred syllables. The regression results support the T Test results by holding all control variables constant. Both the paired T Test and regression results confirm that overall anxiety and test anxiety has both benefits and drawbacks on learners' oral fluency, but the benefits are more than drawbacks. Therefore, how to control classroom anxiety and test anxiety is extremely important. Thus some practical strategies to alleviate students' classroom anxiety are provided.