An Investigation Of English Reading Anxiety Of Vocational College Students

Reading is very important in English language learning. Especially for vocational college students, they need learning major English to improve English level and extend professional knowledge. At present, the studies of many experts indicated that reading is influenced by various elements; in particular, emotional factors attracted the attention and research of more and more scholars. English reading anxiety is one of them.This study aims to explore whether English reading anxiety exist among vocational college students; to research levels of reading anxiety among vocational college students; to find the main causes of English reading anxiety; to give suggestions and enlightenment of the teaching methods in English reading class.According to Krashen’s input hypothesis and the affective filter hypothesis and information processing theory, the author made a study on English reading anxiety of160vocational college students from Hubei University Vocational Technology College. A total of160vocational college students participated in the research. But there is few such studies in China. In1999, foreign language reading anxiety scale was created by Saito, Howitz and Garza. The scale will be modified according to Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale. In this study, the author uses questionnaire and personal interviews with a combination of methods to collect the data of research questions. The results of the questionnaire carefully selected effective, and the data of questionnaires will enter into computer by the use of SPSS20.0.The result shows that vocational college students in the process of reading comprehension does exist different levels of reading anxiety. When the students have confidence in reading process or are interested in reading material itself, their reading anxiety is low. When interviewing, the author found that students have too little number of words in the process of reading comprehension and they have no confidence to do different types of reading passage, especially not familiar with. They don’t understand the new words’meaning caused by long difficult sentences, and so on.Based on the above findings, this article on how to reduce the vocational college students’English reading anxiety and puts forward some suggestions for improving the efficiency of reading and enlightenment. English teachers should in the reading class create low anxiety environment for students in the reading class, provide students suitable reading materials, strengthen the students’reading strategies training, help students improve reading confidence and interest and enhance the students’reading understanding and cross-cultural background knowledge.