An Examination Of The Construct Of Foreign Language Reading Anxiety In Chinese Students Majoring In FL

Since the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) was developed and published by Horwitz et al. (1986), much foreign language anxiety research has used the scale yielding nearly consistent findings: foreign language anxiety is pervasive and has a moderate negative correlation with foreign language learning. With the study continued, researchers found that foreign language anxiety related with listening, speaking, reading and writing was different. Thus, to the scale"some important theoretical concerns have been raised"(Rodriguez & Abreu, 2003). For example, 20 of the 33 items on the scale are about foreign language speaking. Whether FLCAS is valid to measure foreign language anxiety provoking by language learning other than speaking? Whether it's stabled to construct across languages, etc. Some researchers try to solve the problem. For example, Vogely (1998) studied the foreign language listening anxiety, and Cheng et al. (1999) investigated constructs of general foreign language anxiety and foreign language writing anxiety, including their conceptual links. Horwitz (2001) called it a new trend in language anxiety research, which attempts to identify more specifically the sources of anxiety and the relationship of anxiety to various second language proficiencies.However, the study on foreign language reading anxiety (FLRA) is scanty both at home and abroad. Saito, Horwitz and Garza (1999) put forward the construct of FLRA for the first time,including the specific foreign language reading anxiety scale (FLRAS) to measure it. They regarded FLRA as a language-skill-specific anxiety, which changes with native language-target language pairing in terms of writing system and culture, and relatively independent of general foreign language anxiety. Unfortunately, there are few studies on the construct, especially in China.Foreign language education in China, as Xiang (2003) pointed out, is still in a situation in which the connection between cognition and emotion is neglected. Influenced by the study of individual learner differences (IDs) and humanistic psychology, studies on foreign language anxiety have come to be hot to Chinese researchers. However, FLCAS has been employed universally in China no matter what kind of anxiety is studied: general foreign language anxiety or foreign language-skill-specific anxiety. Though a few researchers have taken notice of the differences between the two kinds of anxiety, they still use FLCAS as their instrument. So sometimes it's hard to avoid cutting the feet to fit the shoes. Thus because of the lack of a uniform and specific measurement, findings of FLRA research are often controversial.Concerning the evident differences on FL learning environments between China and...