194 / 2021-06-30 16:24:32

A Case Study on Chinese Students' Speaking Anxiety as EFL Learners

Chinese EFL learners,speaking anxiety,gender,language skill,self-perceived proficiency

This paper aims to report a case study that investigates Chinese students’ speaking anxiety when learning English as a foreign language. The research questions of this study are as follows: 1. Do Chinese EFL learners feel anxious in their speaking process? If so, what can be the variation in the level of their anxiety? 2. What strategies can be adopted to alleviate the previous speaking anxiety? 80 senior high school students and 80 undergraduate students were involved. The instrument used in the study was taken from Yaikhong et al. (2012) and modified for the purposes and specific circumstances of this investigation. The average level of anxiety measured by means of the questionnaire was the response variable, whereas gender, the year of study, the grade in language skills, the self-perceived proficiency and the perceived difficulty of the English language were included as the explanatory variables. The results reveal that gender, the grade in language skills and the self-perceived proficiency can account for the variation in the levels of anxiety among participants. This paper ends with coping strategies of interventions for helping students tackle with the negative impact of anxiety on their speaking performance and foreign language learning experiences.