A Study Of Correlations Between Reading Anxiety And Reading Strategies Of English Majors

The objective of this thesis is to examine the relationships between foreginlanguage reading anxiety and reading strategies in Chinese EFL context.Saito et al (1999) promotes the concept of Foreign Language Reading Anxietyand employs Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) designed bythemselves to carry out the investigation and the results show that reading canprovoke anxiety, and it has a negative correlation with reading performance.MacIntyre&Noels (1996) also finds that language anxiety and language strategiesare negatively correlated. However, few studies focus on the relationship betweenreading anxiety and reading strategies. The present study is then carried out in such abackgound.This study randomly chooses110sophomores of English majors of Xi’anInternational Studies University as subjects. Two questionnaires–Foreign LanguageReading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) and English Reading Strategies Scale (ERSS) and areading test paper (authentic reading materials from TEM4of Apr.2009) areemployed to help collect the data, and then the statistical methods from SPSS, such asdescriptive analysis, correlation analysis and one-way ANOVA are applied here toanalyze foreign language reading anxiety and foreign language reading strategiesrespectively first, and then the relationship between them. The results indicate thatthere is a negative relation between reading anxiety and reading strategies, anddifferent levels of reading-anxious students show different employment of readingstrategies.In the end, the author provides some insights into corresponding pedagogicalimplications. Teachers should firstly take effective measures to help students lowertheir levels of anxiety. Secondly, teachers should master the knowledge of readingstrategies themselves first, and then cultivate students reading strategiescorresondently so as to lower their anxiey level.