Anxiety in recognizing and reading Chinese characters aloud in beginning-level Chinese language courses among American University of Beirut students -

Abstract

Anxiety has been well recognized as one of the factors affecting success in the second language acquisition- or foreign language learning by a number of researchers. The aim of this study is to explore the anxiety in recognizing and reading Chinese characters at the beginning level among American University of Beirut students in Lebanon. Very few foreign language anxiety studies have been conducted in the context of learning Chinese, and even fewer studies highlight the foreign student’s anxiety in learning Chinese, especially in learning Chinese characters in a non-Chinese linguistic landscape. Furthermore, studies related to the language skills, including reading, listening and writing have not attracted attention until recently. Chinese language reading anxiety is a construct that is relevant to, but distinct from, other foreign language anxiety constructs, especially that Chinese is a tonal language, and the tone information plays a significant role in identifying and recognizing Chinese speech. Beginners who learn Chinese do not start with writing characters, but start with Pinyin, a pronunciation system (or another writing system) that represents Chinese words in Latin letters combining consonants and vowels with tone markers. Moreover, Chinese is a logographic language. At the beginning level, Chinese learners are also required to learn some language skills of recognizing and reading characters. People have difficulty in relating Pinyin to the characters. Chinese characters are highly important since they are used more widely and frequently than Pinyin, both in practical writing and reading. This rather complex situation could cause anxiety among beginning learners of Chinese. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the anxiety in learning Chinese in a non-Chinese context, specifically in Lebanon, and in a non-English-dominating environment. It explores the existence and causes of language learning anxiety with the aid of the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale(FLRAS) and the Foreign