Study Of The Relationship Between English Reading Anxiety Of Vocational College Students And Their Reading Performance

With the development of the second language acquisition research, the focus of foreign language teaching and the second language teaching have been shifted from teaching to learning, and researchers began to concentrate on the nature of the second language acquisition and its relevant causes. Among these, more and more attention has been paid to the emotional problems in language teaching and anxiety becomes the key point. It's generally acknowledged that there is a negative correlation between foreign language anxiety and foreign language performance. Recently, there has been a trend of language-skill-specific anxiety research.Under current conditions in our country, reading is the most important way of obtaining English knowledge and accounts for a great proportion in various examinations. The traditional teaching method, however, leads to the lack of cultural background, ambiguity tolerance and discourse awareness. As a result, relatively high anxiety exists in students' reading comprehension and influences their reading performance.The purpose of the study is to find out the actual situation of the vocational college students in our college and its influence upon their reading performance, in hopes that it can provide some evidence for improving the later reading teaching through the survey and analysis.The subject of the study is 114 accounting major freshmen in Jingmen Vocational College. Data for the quantitative study were collected by using questionnaires, including individual background information, Foreign Reading Anxiety Scale (FRAS) by Saito et al and Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (FLAS) by Horwitz et al, and taking 3 reading comprehension model tests. With the help of SPSS 15.0, Pearson correlation analysis, comparison of means and descriptive statistics were computed with the target sample. The analysis of the data indicates the following: there exists relatively high English anxiety and English reading anxiety in our vocational college students, which are related yet distinct; there is a negative correlation between reading anxiety and 3 test scores; there is a positive correlation between low reading anxiety and the mean of 3 test scores, but negative between middle and high reading anxiety and the mean. According to the first 2 questionnaires, some causes leading to the students' reading anxiety are sorted out: acquired knowledge, self-concept, ambiguity tolerance, reading strategies, motivation and gender, which are analyzed by the descriptive statistics of the relevant items. Then, six proposals for reducing reading anxiety are put forward. Of course, more problems are needed to be studied and discussed.