The Impacts on Chinese Language Enjoyment and Anxi...
The impacts of gender，the level of Chinese proficiency and country of origin of these students on their Chinese language enjoyment and anxiety are also a focus of this study.One-way ANOVA was applied to test the correlation of Chinese language enjoyment/anxiety with gender，and the correlation of Chinese language enjoyment/anxiety with the number of foreign languages a student had mastered.The univariate analysis showed that there was no significant correlation between Chinese language enjoyment/anxiety and gender.The correlation between Chinese language enjoyment and the number of foreign languages a student had mastered was not significant either.However，the number of foreign languages a student had learned had a significant impact on Chinese language anxiety:η2=0.05，F(2，151)=4.32，p=0.015.A subsequent test revealed that the difference between students who had mastered four or more foreign languages(M=2.42，SD=0.76)and students who had mastered one foreign language(M=2.86，SD=0.61)，and the difference between students who had mastered four or more foreign languages and students who had mastered two or three foreign languages(M=2.80，SD=0.60)were both significant.That is，the level of enjoyment experienced by students who had mastered four or more foreign languages was noticeably lower than the level of enjoyment experienced by students who had mastered one foreign language and students who had mastered two or three foreign languages.
Fig.6.3 below shows the relationship between Chinese language anxiety and the number of foreign languages mastered:
Fig.6.3 The relationship between chinese language anxiety and the number of foreign languages mastered
note:The error line represents a 95%confidence level.
This finding is partially similar to a finding of Dewaele et al.(2017);that is，there is no significant correlation between students’number of foreign languages mastered and their foreign language enjoyment.Students in the study of Dewaele et al.(2017)were multi-lingual already，so learning and mastering another language would not bring them much enjoyment.A large proportion of students in this study were in a similar situation，and some of them had already mastered five languages.Similarly，to these students，learning and mastering another language，in this case Chinese，did not give them heightened enjoyment.In contrast，Dewaele and MacIntyre(2014)grouped their informants on the basis of the number of foreign languages they had mastered into the second language group，the third language group，the fourth language group，the fifth language group and the sixth or above language group;they found that the more languages students had mastered，the higher level of enjoyment they were experiencing.However，this study did not yield a similar finding to theirs.