An Empirical Study On Text Type Of Reading Material And Reading Anxiety

Since 1980s, the focus of researches turns from how the teachers teach to how learners learn. Researchers pay more attention to individuals. Researchers and language teachers do a host of researches on good students and bad students in order to know why some students study well while the others study badly. Researchers found that there are many factors that affect language learning such as cognitive and affective factors. In the study of second language acquisition and foreign language learning, cognitive consideration has long been a very important factor for the linguists or teachers. However, the affective domain is juxtaposed to the cognitive side. It is another important factor to be considered. Understanding how human beings feel, respond, believe and value is an exceedingly important aspect of a theory of second language acquisition and foreign language learning. Anxiety study belongs to affective domain of second language acquisition and learning. Since 1980s, more and more researchers have noticed the effect of language anxiety on language learning and have achieved a lot. The present author will investigate the reading anxiety of Chinese students to find out effective methods to overcome reading anxiety of students.Anxiety is a subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, worry and nervousness. It can be classified into strait anxiety, state anxiety and situation anxiety. Language anxiety is a situation-specific anxiety, which is experienced when a situation requires the use of a second language with which the individual is not fully proficient. Language anxiety can interfere with encoding, storage, and retrieval processes of language learning by creating a divided attention scenario for anxious students. Language anxiety will interfere language communication and language learning. Unsuccessful language learning may make students have anxiety and vice versa. The negative effect of language anxiety on language learning cannot be ignored. If teachers find out the cause and methods of anxiety of students, theanxiety can be alleviated. Anxiety study is quite insufficient in our country, especially the empirical study. Therefore, I wish my investigation could help to find out a method of overcoming language anxiety.In the present study, the present author wants to investigate if students have different attitudes toward the different types of articles and if different types of reading material may lead to different degrees of anxiety. To seek objective answers to those questions, the author designs the present experiment, which includes the selection of two pieces of reading material and design of anxiety measurement. The two reading texts will have the same length and the same new word coverage. The semantic differential scale will be adopted to measure the attitude of the readers. The two different types of articles are given to 180 students who are divided into 3 groups, each of which includes 30 female students and 30 male students with different English levels.The global analysis on the experimental data manifests the following results: 1) Students have more positive, relaxed attitude toward narrative articles while the expository article makes students more tension, which shows that students have different attitudes and different anxiety levels toward the different types of articles. 2) Different sexes have different attitudes toward different types of articles. Both male students and female students have more positive attitude toward expository article. Female students have more positive attitude toward narrative articles than male students.3) The anxiety level of students will decrease with the English level. The higher the grade is, the more adaptable to expository articles the students are.The present research has certain pedagogical sense. Text type of the article is one of the factors that causes the difficulty of the article. When teachers teach reading skill, teachers should consider the difficulties of the text not only caused by new vocabulary and complexity of sentences, but also caused by text type. The difficulty level of reading material should be controlled efficiently when selecting reading material. The different factors attributable to the difficulty of reading material should have different difficult indexes at the different stages. The factors should be arranged...