| Reading plays a vital role in language learning. Many factors are believed to influence reading efficiency. Among them, affect is considered to be a significant factor. Anxiety is an important aspect of affective variables.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. The past two decades has witnessed an explosion of research into the topic of foreign language anxiety. However, the study of foreign language reading anxiety first emerged at the end of 20th century. A few researches have been conducted to examine the effects of reading anxiety on reading performance at home and abroad and confirmed a negative relationship between them. However, we still do not fully understand how reading anxiety influences reading performance and what causes reading anxiety. Therefore, I wish my study could help to find out the factors that elicit reading anxiety and that affect reading comprehension by investigating the reading anxiety of both high school students and English majors.The present study aimed to examine the relationship among text type, reading anxiety and reading comprehension, so as to find that text type was one of the possible factors that cause reading anxiety. One hundred and twenty high school junior students and ninety five English majors in their second year were selected randomly as the subjects. They were first asked to finish a self-perception questionnaire with their background information on it. After that, they were required to read three types of passages with a time limit. Immediately after the reading, students were asked to fill the semantic differential scale printed at the end of each passage, which aimed to find out their attitudes toward the three types of passages and their reading anxiety level. The two experiments were launched at different time, but followed the same procedure.Analysis of the data manifests the following results: 1) Both high school students and English majors experienced a relatively low level of reading anxiety. 2) Students felt more relaxed when reading narrations and more anxious when reading expositions; there was a significant positive correlation between text type and reading anxiety; text type had a more significant correlation with the reading anxiety of English majors. 3) Students had a higher reading comprehension level of narration than that of argumentation and exposition, with exposition the lowest; text type had a more significant correlation with the reading comprehension of high school students than that of English majors. 4) A moderate negative correlation was found between reading anxiety and reading comprehension; the correlations between reading anxiety and reading comprehension of narration and argumentation were more significant than that of exposition; reading anxiety had a greater influence on the reading comprehension of high school students. 5) A triangular model was proposed to demonstrate the relationships between text type, reading anxiety and reading comprehension.The findings in this study have significant pedagogical implications on English reading teaching. It informed us not only the attitudes of students towards different text types but also the reading anxiety and reading comprehension level of the three types of passages. Text type and reading anxiety exerted a greater influence on the reading comprehension of high school students. Therefore, English teachers in high schools should make more efforts to help students reduce their reading anxiety, and consequently improve the reading comprehension level.
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