Overall Levels of Chinese Language Enjoyment and C...
The analysis shows that informants’average enjoyment score was 4.03(out of 5)，with the lowest score of 1.76 and the highest score of 4.90，the standard deviation being 0.42;the average anxiety score was 2.73(out of 5)，with the lowest score of 1.00 and the highest score of 4.50，the standard deviation being 0.65.This indicates that these students experienced a high level of Chinese language enjoyment，and their scores are consistently high with only small intersample differences.The data also indicate that students’level of Chinese language anxiety was moderately high pointing to some degree of anxiety，with a difference within inter-sample differences higher than those of enjoyment but still relatively stable.Paired-samples t-test shows that students’levels of Chinese language enjoyment and anxiety were considerably different，with enjoyment obviously greater than anxiety:M diff=1.32，t(153)=21.21，p＜0.0001.
Results from this study are largely the same as the conclusions reached by Dewaele and MacIntyre(2014).In their study involving 1746 second language learners，the average foreign language enjoyment score was 3.82，and the standard deviation was 0.46;the average foreign language anxiety score was 2.75，and the standard deviation was 0.83;and the level of foreign language enjoyment of these informants was considerably higher than the level of their foreign language anxiety.While the study reported in this chapter involved one target language(Chinese)，Dewaele and MacIntyre’s study involved several target languages(English 49%，French 15.8%，Spanish 12.5%，Dutch 9%，German 8%，and other language 5.7%).The enjoyment level of informants in their study was lower than that in this study，but the anxiety level of their study was similar to the level in this study.Given that informants in this study were exclusively learners of Chinese and informants in the study of Dewaele and MacIntyre(2014)were largely learners of Indo-European languages such as English，French，etc.，there is a possibility that the Chinese language and culture may have brought great enjoyment to the learners in this study.Such inference is supported by findings of a study conducted by De Smet et al.(2018).They investigated foreign language enjoyment and anxeity of children in Belgium learning English and Dutch，examining the impact of different target languages on learners’language emotions.They found that children learning English experienced noticeably higher level of foreign language enjoyment than children learning Dutch.In the study reported in this article，many informants expressed in interviews following the survey that learning the Chinese language and Chinese characters brought them enjoyment，for instance，pronunciation of some vowels in Chinese sound like music to them.In this study and in the study conducted by Dewaele and MacIntyre(2014)，levels of foreign language anxiety were both around 2.7(this study recorded the level of Chinese language anxiety 0.02 score lower than foreign language anxiety in Dewaele and MacIntyre’s(2014)study)，suggesting that the majority of second language learners experience medium level of foreign language anxiety.