A Systematic Review of Anxiety, Motivation, and Strategy in Learning Chinese as a Second Language From 2008 to 2022

Anxiety, motivation, and strategy have long been seen as critical in second language acquisition. This study presents a systematic review of the literature on these variables in terms of their relationship with one another, their effects on learning outcomes, and how they are affected by technology-assisted tools in the teaching of Chinese as a second language. This study includes 24 articles for the review study based on the criteria and process of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P) and the clustering techniques of VOSviewer. It is found that 1) anxiety, motivation, and strategy were interrelated, that is, motivation was negatively associated with anxiety but positively related to strategy, while strategy could positively predict anxiety; 2) anxiety could both positively and negatively affect learning outcomes, while motivation and strategy could both positively and insignificantly influence learning outcomes; 3) the technology-assisted tools used in the classroom could both positively and negatively affect the levels of these variables and learning outcomes in the L2 Chinese context. The need to explore more complicated relationships between language-specific individual variables themselves and other possible factors that affect these variables, such as cultural ones, are also discussed for future research.