The Impacts Of Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Upon The English Reading Comprehension Performance Of Senior High School Students

This thesis is going to explore the relationship between senior high schoolstudents’ foreign language reading anxiety and their English reading comprehensionperformance. This research focuses on the reduction of students’ foreign languagereading anxiety and the improvement of English teaching by utilizing statisticsoftware SPSS17.0which builds a quantitative and instructive platform for analysesand recommendations.The research questions in this study are:l) How is foreign language readinganxiety represented among senior high school students?2) How does foreignlanguage reading anxiety impact upon the students’ reading comprehensionperformance?This study was employing a total of103senior high school students fromDongjiang Senior High School in Heyuan. And there were57girls and46boys. All ofthem were assessed by self-report Chinese version of FLRAS and conducted a readingcomprehension test which contained four reading passages and was selected from thepart of reading comprehension in the College Entrance English Examination inGuangdong version in2011. In data analysis, descriptive analysis showed the generalrepresentation of students’ FLRA as well as those of different genders.Independent-sample t-test and one-way ANOVA showed whether there was asigniifcant difference between different genders in the representation of FLRA andwhether there were some signiifcant differences among different anxiety groups inreading comprehension scores. The Pearson correlation analysis was used to ifnd outthe general relation bet’ween students foreign language reading anxiety and theirreading comprehension performance. Besides，the Linear regression analysis was alsoemployed in this research to ifnd out the degree that FLRA could predict learners’reading comprehension performance.The major ifndings were summarized as follows:1) The general level of students’FLRA was high，and llof20items got higher scores than the average scores whosecontents could be treated as the sources of students’ FLRA; male students had higher FLRA than female students did，and there was a signiifcant difference between thesetwo genders in the representation of FLRA; the results of the Independent samplet-test showed that there were5items that presented differences between differentgenders;2) There was a negative correlation bet’ween students FLRA and theirreading comprehension performance; students who had higher FLRA tended to getlower reading comprehension scores; the predictability of FLRA in readingcomprehension performance was signiifcant, and the degree that FLRA could predictlearners’ reading comprehension performance was22.5%.These ifndings indicate that English teachers should help their students tounderstand and identiyf the FLRA, which may help English teachers to improve theEnglish teaching. Besides，English teachers should provide suitable emotionregulation strategies in accordance of their st’udents aptitude.This research attempts to make some potential contributions to the knowledge ofFLRA and relevant knowledge. It is also hoping to offer some implications for theimprovement on English teaching. In order to understand the effects of FLRA onEnglish learning and reading performance, further studies are required.