Relationships among motivation, cross-cultural adaptation and Chinese language achievement: An investigation of international students studying Chinese in the universities of PRC

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between motivational factors, cross-cultural adaptation and Chinese language achievement. The data in the study were collected by Attitudes/Motivation Test Battery (Gardner, 1997), Socio-cultural Adaptation Scales (Searle & Ward, 1990), Persistence/ Voluntary Dropout Decision (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1980), Face-saving Scale (Fu, 2005) and Demographic Information. The participants from Western or Asian backgrounds were learning Chinese at the university level in the People’s Republic of China. Two hundred and fifteen students were surveyed in the study.
The results indicated except that there is no significant relationship between Instrumentality and Socio-cultural Adaptation, all the rest key variables are either statistically significant or positively significant or negatively significant correlated with each other. Multiple regression analysis indicated that Saving Other Face, Integrativenss and Language Anxiety were major variables predicting Socio-cultural Adaptation; Saving Other Face and Integrativenss contributed to predict Academic Adaptation; Motivation seemed to explain the variation of Chinese Language Achievement; and Motivation, Instrumentality and Academic Adaptation contributed to predict Persistence.
Significant differences between Western and Asian student groups were found in terms of Motivation, Adaptation and Chinese Language Achievement. The Western student group tended to perform much better than the Asian student group in spoken, listening and overall level of Chinese Language Achievement and they seemed to have higher level of Integrativeness and better Socio-cultural Adaptation than the Asian student group. Recommendations were made to enhance motivation and second language acquisition.