An Empirical Study Of The Correlations Between Reading Anxiety And English Reading Effects Of College Students

Based on the Krashen's theories of input hypothesis and affective filter hypothesis, this thesis tries to learn about why Chinese college students achieve not quite good English reading effects. It is easy to find that the reading effects of college students are far away from expectation through different kinds of English examinations and their reading activities both in and after class. So the thesis aims to explore this reason by means of questionnaire and interview, focusing on making it clear what are the correlations between foreign language reading anxiety and reading effects. By researching, the thesis makes an attempt to find the answers to the following questions: Whether will college students feel anxious in English reading? How does the English reading anxiety affect the reading effects? What have led to English reading anxiety? How should English teachers help students to overcome the reading anxiety and improve the reading effects in teaching?During consulting lots of historical documents, the author finds that previous researches on foreign language reading anxiety mainly focused on researching the relationships between the reading anxiety and reading achievements. The author believes that the achievement is just one of the measuring factors in judging the students'reading proficiency, so we can't understand one-sidedly the relationships between students'achievements and their reading proficiency. It is true that reading achievements can't completely reflect the students'reading proficiency, whether students have quite strong reading ability depends on whether they are participating in effective reading. By reading effects the author means that: By reading whether students can improve their abilities of obtaining information, guessing and determining and comprehending the new words; whether they can improve the ability of correctly reading and reading in proper speed; whether they can improve the ability of correctly transmitting and communicating information resulting from the reading material. The improvement of these abilities will definitely promote improvement of the reading effects.By employing questionnaire and interview, the author carried out an investigation on 305 English majors in Education Institute of Taiyuan University. The aim is to explore the correlations between FLRA and reading anxiety, focusing on the influence of different genders, different grades, different English proficiency, different text types, different English success expectation of examination, etc. on reading anxiety. All the data were collected and processed and analyzed using SPSS, and in the end the following conclusions were drawn:a) Chinese college students really have different degree of English reading anxiety.b) Freshmen, sophomores and juniors respectively show different degree of reading anxiety. Among those variables, anxiety provoked by lack of language self-confidence and linguistic competence ranks highest among freshmen, sophomores and juniors.c) Students'English proficiency and their reading anxiety are negatively correlated.d) The higher the outside expectation and students'expectation of success on English reading are, the higher the level of reading anxiety is. The lower , the lower.e) The more difficult and strange the text type is, the higher the reading anxiety is; the easier, the lower.f) Foreign language reading anxiety and reading effects are negatively correlated.