The Relationship Between South Africa's Western Cape Middle School Students' Chinese Language Learning Motivation,Anxiety And Cognitive Strategies

This thesis researches how the Chinese language learning motivation and anxiety of South Africa's Western Cape middle school students affect their Chinese language learning strategies.Even though many researchers have done similar research,yet no one has done this research on South Africa's middle school students.South Africa just put teaching Chinese as a foreign language in its national curriculum,and just started Chinese education in 2016.For this reason,the author decided to take advantage of the timing to write about and research how South Africa's middle school students' language learning beliefs impact their strategies.In order to accomplish this,the researcher decided to consult Horwitz' BALLI(Beliefs About Language Learning Index)questionnaire to measure students' beliefs and Oxford's SILL(Strategy Inventory of Language Learning)questionnaire to measure strategy use.The researcher used SPSS software to sort through the data and do statistics.To prove the validity and reliability of the questionnaires Cronbach's Alpha was used.Using statistics,it was found that only the motivational and anxiety related questions of the BALLI questionnaire could be used,and only the only the memory,cognitive,compensative and mega-cognitive strategies part of the SILL questionnaire could be used,thus the effect of learning motivation and anxiety on cognitive strategies was chosen as study subject.Even though the statistics showed that the validity of the questionnaires aren't ideal,there have been enough research based on the same questionnaires which were proven valid and reliable to make the use of the questionnaires justifiable.The results of the statistics are also in line with the results of other researchers who did the 'same research.The results showed that anxiety and cognitive strategy has a positive relationship.Anxiety and motivation,memory strategies and meta-cognitive strategies have an inverse relationship.It also showed that motivation and all the strategies have a significant and positive relationship.This thesis also discussed some ideas on how teachers could deal with students' anxiety problems,since anxiety has a significant effect on students' use of strategies,it also]ooked at how to raise student's motivation.Many authors have discussed this topic in detail;therefore,this author has declined to do so in this thesis and has not done more related research.