A Comparative Study Examining The Academic Anxiety Experienced By American English-Speaking And Chinese EFL Graduate Students

This study aims to exam the academic anxiety experienced by English speaking American graduate students studying in America and non-English speaking Chinese graduate students studying in China.Specifically,the levels of academic anxiety,the sources of academic anxiety,academic anxiety coping strategies,and the effect of demographic characteristics on academic anxiety were explored among these graduate students.Totally,289 graduate students participated in this study,with 149 English speaking American graduate students from a university in Western New York and 140 non-English speaking Chinese graduate students from a university in central China.Mixed method research approach was adopted in this study.In the quantitative part,graduate students? academic anxiety questionnaire developed by Hong and Huang(2018)was used to collect the data from the participants.The questionnaire exams program expectation anxiety,classroom anxiety,relationship anxiety,and course assignment anxiety.The questionnaire data was analyzed quantitatively.In the qualitative part,four focus group interviews were further performed to get a better understanding of the research questions.Specifically,major sources of academic anxiety,academic anxiety coping strategies were discussed.The findings were reported as follow.From a descriptive statistics perspective,English speaking American graduate students studying in America generally experienced higher levels of academic anxiety than non-English speaking Chinese graduate students studying in China.From an inferential statistics perspective,there was significant English language(i.e.,English L1 vs.EFL)effect on English speaking American and non-English speaking Chinese graduate students? academic anxiety.Non-English speaking Chinese graduate students experienced statistically significant higher academic anxiety level than English speaking American graduate students(p <.01).Further,significant difference was found among students with different family income(p <.01).Students with above family income show significant lower academic anxiety than students with below average family income and students with average family income.However,no significant difference was found on graduate students? academic anxiety level in terms of gender(male vs.female)and educational status(master students vs.Ph.D.students).From a qualitative perspective,financial,time,and multiple commitments were the three major academic anxiety sources reported by both English speaking American master and Ph.D.students.English speaking American Ph.D.students seems to have high academic anxiety on all the four aspects of AA,CA,PA,and RA,while English speaking American master students seems to have high academic anxiety on the aspect of AA.Slightly different from American graduate students,competition among peers,financial pressures,inadequate English language fluency and the expectations(self-expectation,expectations from parents and supervisors),and inadequate resources were the major academic anxiety sources reported by non-English speaking Chinese master students.The faculty graduation requirements of publishing advanced papers on advanced journals,the long duration of Ph.D.study,inadequate English language fluency and financial pressure were the major academic anxiety sources for non-English speaking Chinese Ph.D.students.In addition,both non-English speaking master and Ph.D.students have high academic anxiety on the aspect of PA.In terms of coping strategies,organizing and planning were the major coping strategies developed by American graduate students,while seeking for emotional support and then tackle the anxiety problems were the coping strategies adopted by Chinese graduate students.The important implications for graduate students,professors,and school leaders were discussed.