| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 應用外語系 === 102 === Foreign language anxiety has been one of the popular research topics in SLA due to its influential and complicated phenomenon on learning. From the last decade, learning Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language has received more and more attention. However, most of the research on foreign language anxiety mainly focused on learning English, French and Spanish rather than Chinese. The present study intends to examine the learning anxiety of international students learning Chinese in Taiwan. The research questions of the study include: (1) What is the learning anxiety level of international students in terms of gender, nationality, and length of Chinese learning? (2) What are the sources of Chinese learning anxiety? (3) How do international students cope with their Chinese learning anxiety? The participants were 107 international students from 17 countries who studied Chinese in universities in Taiwan. Most of the participants were mainly from Indonesia and Vietnam. The questionnaire was adapted from foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS) by Horwitz, et al (1986), sources of language anxiety and coping style on Chinese learning anxiety by Huang (2007). Questionnaires were sent out to the participants through both online and hard-copy. Then the participants were divided into high anxiety group and low anxiety group. Lastly, 15 participants were chosen randomly for interviews. The results showed that the longer length of Chinese learning, the more anxious participants became due to the higher self-expectation on learners themselves. Furthermore, the major anxiety source is language content and culture. The qualitative findings indicated that difficulties in language content include tone, pronunciation, word recognition, and characters writing. In addition, positive thinking is the most frequently used strategies to deal with Chinese learning anxiety. Results also showed that low anxiety learners tend to cope with anxiety by peer seeking and positive thinking, while high anxiety learners tend to use avoidance and resignation as their strategies. The study is expected to add empirical evidences to the literature of Chinese learning anxiety, to provide pedagogical implications on how instructors can help international students deal with Chinese learning anxiety and further improve their Chinese learning more effectively.
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