Effect of language usage on the emotional experience of Chinese students in South Korea

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Effect of Language Usage on Emotional Experience of Chinese Students in South Korea

Fan Fan Educational Counseling Graduate School of Education Seoul National University

In the current globalized era, the number of foreigners living in Korea have increased rapidly. This means that the counselors in Korea are having to deal with a growing number of non-Korean speaking clients. Therefore, counselors need to have a better understanding of their clients cultural and linguistic backgrounds to do their jobs more effectively. Language is essential in counseling. When clients are not capable of effectively communicating in their second language, they were observed to be less emotionally engaged. Since emotional experience plays an irreplaceable role in counseling, it is necessary to investigate the effect of foreign clients' language usage on their emotional experience. Chinese students are the majority of international students in Korea, and their mental health has received increasing attention. For this study, we chose Chinese students in Korea as subjects. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the effects of the first or second language usage on Chinese students' emotional experience by partially replicating Arrachea's(1996) study. A total of fifty two Chinese undergraduates and graduate students of different universities in Seoul participated in this study. The subjects were randomly separated into two groups and were asked to recall their saddest moment during their life time. Then they were asked to express their feelings in either their mother tongue (Chinese) or their second language(Korean). Before and after the emotion induction phase, the magnitude of anxiety was measured by STAI(State-Trait Anxiety Inventory) and DACL(Depression Adjective Check List). In addition, two independent raters coded the narrative negative affect terms' intensity based on Magai's(1989) coding system. After excluding six invalid data, of 52 participants, there were 46 subjects (Male=11, Female=35) data were analyzed. In order to examine whether the Chinese students of the first language group experienced more intensive anxiety and depression than the students in second language group, ANCOVA was utilized to compare the two groups' STAI and DACL's post-test results with the pre-test scores as covariance. The two groups described their emotional intensity, which was then compared through a two-sample t-test. The result demonstrated that the Chinese language group's anxiety and depression level was significantly higher than the Korean language group. Meanwhile, the narrative negative affect intensity in Chinese group was also significantly stronger than the Korean language group. Thus all the 3 hypotheses were supported. These results proved that when Chinese students speak their first language(Chinese) they feel and express more intensive emotional experiences than that when they speak their second language(Korean in this study). It exhibits the importance of taking such characteristics into consideration during counseling sessions. In addition, it is necessary to cultivate more bilingual counselors who are able to speak the mother tongue of foreign clients.