Foreign Language Anxiety. A Case Study of Chinese University Students Learning English as a Foreign Language

This paper presents an empirical study of Foreign Language Anxiety in Chinese university students learning English as a foreign language.

The subjects of the present study were 344 college students from Mainland China. They responded to a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire adapted from Horwitz’s Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS).

Their responses to the questionnaire were submitted to exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (with the help of statistical package of SPSS and AMOS) for identifying anxiety dimensions.

The results show that four dimensions of anxiety exist among the subjects and the two dimensions of the FLCAS were closely examined to find the extent to which that the four-factor model adequately fit the data. The fit indices suggested that the instrument measuring the dimensions of anxiety specific to college students in China was valid construct-wise and reliable for future use.