An Empirical Study of the Relationship between General Self-efficacy, Chinese Character Learning Anxiety, and Learning Burnout among International Students in China

Abstract (1) Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlation between general self-efficacy, Chinese Character Learning Anxiety, and Learning Burnout among international students in China. The participants of the study were 537 international students coming to China, and the three psychological variables were measured and data collected by the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES), the Chinese Character Learning Anxiety Scale (CCLAS), and the Chinese Character Learning Burnout Scale ( CCLBS), quantitative research methods were used to measure and collect data on three psychological variables and Structural Equation Modeling AMOS 25.0 to investigate the mediating role of general self-efficacy on Chinese characters learning anxiety and burnout. (2) Methods The study used questionnaire method for data collection. After excluding invalid data, the researcher entered the remaining data and used SPSS 27.0 and AMOS 25.0 software to analyze the entered data for further data processing and constructing hypotheses model test. (3) Results The data analysis revealed that self-efficacy was significantly negatively correlated with Chinese characters learning anxiety and Chinese characters learning burnout, i.e., groups of international students with higher levels of self-efficacy experienced lower levels of learning anxiety and burnout. The Bootstrap test results show that the 95% CI of the indirect effect of each variable of self-efficacy on each variable of Chinese character learning anxiety and learning burnout does not contain 0, and that there is a significant mediating effect in the model. Meanwhile, Chinese character learning anxiety predicted learning burnout, so it is believed that self-efficacy played a partial mediating effect in the model. (4) Conclusions The results of the study showed that self-efficacy was significantly negatively correlated with foreign language learning anxiety and burnout, while foreign language learning anxiety was significantly positively correlated with burnout. The results of the mediating role detection analysis showed that foreign language learning anxiety predicted learning burnout and that self-efficacy had a partial mediating effect on the path of foreign language learning anxiety on learning burnout.