A Study On The Relationship Between English Reading Anxiety And Reading Achievement Of Senior High School Students

As an important skill for learners to master a foreign language,English reading has received much attention from researchers at home and abroad.In foreign language learning,reading is considered to be difficult.Related studies indicated that students’ reading achievement can be affected by reading self-efficacy and reading anxiety.Therefore,in recent years,a number of researchers have focused on exploring the correlations among students’ English reading self-efficacy,reading anxiety and reading achievement.However,how do these three factors influence each other is still unclear.Besides,most studies took college students as research participants and few studies focused on senior high school students.Therefore,taking 210 senior two students as participants,using self-efficacy theory and Affective Filter Hypothesis as the theoretical foundation,adopting the questionnaire and interview as the research method,the current research aims to explore the correlations among reading anxiety,reading self-efficacy and reading achievement and further explore whether reading self-efficacy plays a mediating role between reading anxiety and reading achievement.Therefore,the author proposed three research questions:(1)What is the general status of senior high school students’ reading self-efficacy and reading anxiety?(2)Is there any correlation among students’ reading self-efficacy,reading anxiety and reading achievement?(3)Does reading self-efficacy play a mediating role between reading anxiety and reading achievement? If it does,what kind of mediating role does it play?After analyzing the data collected from questionnaires and interviews,the current study has the following findings:(1)Senior high school students experienced a medium level of reading self-efficacy and reading anxiety.Sense of effort ranks first among the three dimensions of reading selfefficacy while self-assessment ranks first among the five dimensions of reading anxiety.(2)Students’ reading self-efficacy is significantly and positively correlated with reading achievement.Students’ reading anxiety is significantly and negatively correlated with reading achievement.Students’ reading self-efficacy is significantly and negatively correlated with reading anxiety.(3)Students’ reading self-efficacy plays a full mediating role between reading anxiety and reading achievement.Based on the research results,this study also offered some pedagogical implications for English teachers on enhancing students’ reading self-efficacy and lowering their reading anxiety in order to help students read more actively and get better reading achievement.