The Chinese Bouyei College Students’ Strategies for Coping with Classroom Anxiety in Foreign Language Learning: A Survey Study

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the degree of FL classroom anxiety experienced and the coping strategies employed by the Chinese Bouyei college students. The research subjects were 320 1st- and 2nd-year Bouyei college students from five colleges located in the southern and southwestern areas of Guizhou Province, China. Two sorts of written questionnaires were administered to collect the data. The simple descriptive statistics, i.e. mean, standard deviation (S.D.) and percentage were used to find out the levels of the informants’ FL classroom anxiety and their anxiety coping strategy use, while a factor analysis was employed to examine the students’ anxiety coping strategy categories. The findings demonstrate that the levels of the Chinese Bouyei college students’ overall FL classroom anxiety and their reported anxiety coping strategy use are at the medium level on the whole. Six main categories of Bouyei college students’ FL classroom anxiety coping strategies were found in the study. In addition, comments were made on the research findings, as well as what English teachers could do to help alleviate and eliminate learners’ FL classroom anxiety.