Library Anxiety Among Chinese Students: Modification and Application of LAS in the Context of Chinese Academic Libraries

Library anxiety among non-native speakers of English

“…There were five documents discussing the factors of library anxiety among international students in countries where English is the dominant language Onwuegbuzie 1997, 2003;Jiao, Onwuegbuzie and Bostick, 2006;Onwuegbuzie and Collins, 2002;Platt and Platt, 2013). Only seven documents described studies carried out in countries where English is not the dominant language (Shoham and Mizrachi, 2001;Anwar, Al-Kandari and Al-Qallaf, 2004;Noor and Ansari, 2010;Abusin, Zainab and Noor, 2011;Swigon, 2011;Erfanmanesh, 2011;Song, Zhang and Clarke, 2014). The remaining documents did not report on the construct of library anxiety and so were considered as not relevant for the objective of this article.…”

“…Knowledge, inclusive of cognitive barriers, has been identified in Shoham and Mizrachi (2001), Jiao and Onwuegbuzie (2002), Anwar, Al-Kandari and AlQallaf (2004), Noor and Ansari (2010), Swigon (2011), Song (2014, and Sinnasamy and Karim (2014). Although Bostick (1992) had indeed traced knowledge of the library as one of the dimensions of library anxiety, it actually only implied lack of Sinnasamy and Karim: Library anxiety among non-native speakers of English familiarity and how confident the users are in using the resources.…”

“…The original LAS had 46 statements. The Hebrew LAS (H-LAS) (Shoham and Mizrachi, 2001) reported only 35 statements, while the Sudanese LAS (SULAS) (Abusin, Zainab and Noor, 2011) reported 36 statements, the Chinese LAS (C-LAS) (Song, 2014) reported 36 statements, and the Malay LAS (M-LAS) (Sinnasamy and Noor, 2014) reported only 29 statements. The Polish LAS (P-LAS) (Swigon, 2011), however, retained the original 46 statements.…”

“…Ariyapala and Edzan (2002) also indicated difficulty in understanding and using online catalogs as one of the barriers faced by such students. Song, Zhang and Clarke (2014) reported that although Asian students in the United States perceive themselves as computer literate, they might lack the information retrieval skills to use the resources effectively.…”

“…Anwar, Al-Kandari and Al-Qallaf, 2004;Shariff and Zainab, 2007;Noor and Ansari, 2010;Abusin, Zainab and Noor, 2011;Swigon, 2011;Erfanmanesh, 2011;Song, Zhang and Clarke, 2014;Sinnasamy and Karim, 2014;Hosseni, Khosravi and Jahromi, 2014). These studies have indicated that basically the five dimensions of Bostick (1992) remain, but there seems to be a breakdown of these five dimensions into smaller components.…”