The Effects Of High School Students’ English Reading Anxiety, Gender And Personality Tendency On Their Reading Performance

With the advent of humanistic psychology, more and more educators andresearchers at home and abroad have been paying attention to the effects of learners’“affective variables” on learning since the1960s. With the development of the secondlanguage acquisition research, the focus of FL teaching has been shifted from teachingto learning, and the research on FL teaching has emphasized students’ role instead ofteachers’ role. Affective factors have attracted more and more scholars’ attention, ofwhich FL learning anxiety is one important factor. Since1980s, researchers abroadmainly adopted FLCAS that was developed by Horwitz et al.(1986), and made muchdeeper studies on listening, speaking and tests which were considered as the mostanxiety-provoking for learners. Most researches yielded moderately negativecorrelations between FL anxiety and FL achievements. Saito, Garza and Horwitz (1999)developed FLRAS which was used to measure the learners’ FL reading anxiety, andpointed out for the first time that FL reading anxiety was related to, but distinct fromgeneral FL anxiety. Saito et al.(1999) believed that different levels of FL readinganxiety might be caused by different target languages or different native languages. InChina, anxiety studies mainly focused on general FL anxiety, but not enough on FLreading anxiety. In the limited researches on FL reading anxiety yielded different results:some agreed there was gender difference on reading anxiety while others held there wasnot. In addition, the relatively limited researches on FL reading anxiety paid scantattention to high school students.Learners’ personality trait was another essential issue during FL learning. It wasnecessary for teachers to know learners’ personality tendency, and it was beneficial fortheir specific teaching. Although previous studies made some efforts on relationshipbetween personality and FL learning, studies on the combination of personality andreading anxiety are still scant. Thus, it is of great theoretical and pedagogicalimportance to explore how English reading anxiety and gender difference as well aspersonality tendency affect high school students’ reading performance in China.The participants in the present study were339Grade Two students from YanzhouNo.1Senior High school, Shandong Province. All the subjects were randomly selectedin Grade Two from the school. Among the339subjects,176are males and163arefemales. Two questionnaires and a semi-structured interview are adopted in this study. Data are collected and processed through descriptive statistic analysis, Pearsoncorrelation analysis, Independent T-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) so as toexplore the gender and personality difference on high school students’ English readinganxiety, the main sources of their reading anxiety and the effects of their reading anxietytogether with gender and personality on reading performance.The major findings of present research are as follows:1) Generally speaking, most of the subjects are the extroverts, and all the subjectshave shown more or less English reading anxiety.2) The subjects’ reading anxiety shows significant gender and personalitydifference: boys are more anxious than girls and get lower scores in reading than girls;introverts are more anxious than extroverts and get lower scores in reading thanextroverts.3) The interactive effect between gender and reading anxiety on readingperformance is very significant; personality and reading anxiety also show a significantinteractive effect on reading performance; but no interactive effects are found bothbetween gender and personality and among gender, personality and reading anxiety onreading performance.4) The subjects’ reading anxiety is negatively correlated with their readingperformance: the higher the anxiety level is, the lower scores they get. In order to get adeeper investigation of reading anxiety, the present study has made the factor analysis ofthe FL reading anxiety questionnaire, and the result shows that it is suitable to bedivided into three factors. Thus, the present study adopts Saito et al.’(1999) explanation,and classifies the20items of FLRAS into three main factors: general readingcomprehension apprehension by unfamiliar grammar or vocabulary (F1); unfamiliarscript and cultural apprehension (F2); and emotional apprehension (F3).5) Pearson correlation between F1, F2, F3and reading performance shows that theeffect of general reading comprehension apprehension (F1) is weaker than that ofunfamiliar script and cultural apprehension (F2) as well as emotional apprehension (F3)on reading performance.Finally, some tentative discussions are made about the major findings of thepresent study. Besides, pedagogical implications are provided for high school teachingin the hope of helping facilitate English learning and teaching practice.