Predictability of Chinese Language Enjoyment and A...
This study was also interested in the question of whether Chinese language enjoyment/anxiety affects learning outcome for the obvious reason that findings related to this question have a direct implication to teaching and learning.
This study measured the relationship between Chinese language enjoyment/anxiety and students’examination results at the end of academic year with their Chinese language enjoyment/anxiety as the independent variable and their examination results as the dependent variable using One-way ANOVA.
Fig.6.4 and Fig.6.5 below present the result of the analysis of students’enjoyment and anxiety and their Semester 1/Semester 2 examination results:
Fig.6.4 The relationship between students’Chinese language enjoyment and their semester 1/semester 2 examination results
Fig.6.5 The relationship between students’Chinese language anxiety and their semester 1/semester 2 examination results
Graph 4 and Graph 5 present predictability of students’Semester 1/Semester 2 examination results from their Chinese language enjoyment and anxiety.A One-way ANOVA shows that there was no significant correlation between students’Chinese language enjoyment or anxiety and their examination results at the end of Semester 1 and Semester 2.No matter how high or how low their Chinese language enjoyment and anxiety was，the levels of their enjoyment and anxiety did not have any effect on their examination results at the end of Semester 1 and Semester 2.
There have been few studies on the impact of foreign language enjoyment on learning outcome.Dewaele and Alfawzan(2018)studied 189 high school students in Britain and 152 adult Arabic learners of English，using high school students’end of semester foreign language examination results and adult learners’Lex TALE English test results.The analysis resulted in a consistent conclusion between these two groups:enjoyment was positively correlated with learning outcome，and anxiety was negatively correlated with learning outcome;in other words，students with a high level of enjoyment and low level of anxiety did better in examinations than other students.
This study involved very different informants from those in the study conducted by Dewaele and Alfawzan(2018).Firstly，informants in this study were beginning language learners，whereas informants in their study were successful language learners，whether they were school students or adults.Secondly，informants in this study were not learning Chinese under the pressure of obtaining good scores to get into a university course;but school students in Britain in Dewaele and Alfawzan’s(2018)study were learning a foreign language the score of which would be included in the calculation of their overall score for admission to university courses，and students were learning the foreign language and teachers were teaching it under immense pressure to succeed.Thirdly，the target languages were different，Chinese in this study and European languages in Dewaele and Alfawzan’s(2018)study，such as French，Spanish，German and English.Therefore，different findings from these two studies are expected.Foreign language anxiety is generally recognised as an obstacle in second language development(Hewitt and Stephenson，2012;Horwitz，2010;MacIntyre and Gardner，1994a，1994b).In this study，however，the impact of anxiety was found to be minimal.A likely explanation is that these 155 students were beginning learners of Chinese and they were in the stage of a cultural honeymoon and studying in China was a new experience for them.The excitement of life in a new country would mitigate the impact of anxiety on their language learning.
The Dynamic System Theory(Larsen-Freeman and Cameron，2008)regards learning of a second language as a dynamic，chaotic and complex system rather than a linear causal relationship.This system consists of many subsystems，such as teachers，learners，tasks of learning，classroom environment，etc.Each of these sub-systems also includes many variables，and emotions are one of the variables in the sub-system of learners.In this complex and dynamic system，a change in any variable may cause changes in the whole system and these changes are nonlinear，the so-called“butterfly effect”.According to the Dynamic System Theory，foreign students’Chinese language development in this study would be influenced by a range of factors，and emotions were only one of these factors.Other factors included students’cognitive ability，learning environment，teachers，etc.As such，it would be expected that students’Chinese language emotions were not significantly correlated with their language development.This finding has some implications for teaching.On one hand，simply increasing enjoyment or reducing anxiety is not likely to improve learners’language development，so teachers should consider a range of factors affecting teaching and learning.On the other hand，students’individual enjoyment was significantly correlated with their social enjoyment;in order to provide students with better learning experience，teachers may try to increase students’individual enjoyment in learning the language by livening up teaching in the classroom，inproving their relationship with students，so as to promote student’s language development.