A Study Of Correlations Between Reading Anxiety And Reading Strategies Of Junior High School Students

With the development of Humanistic Psychology, affective factors in Education has gained more and more attention. Anxiety, one of the biggest affective factors in foreign language acquisition has been one of the research hot topics since1970s in both domestic and abroad. Researchers investigated the effects of foreign language anxiety from a different perspective. Since the concept of foreign language learning anxiety was first proposed by Horwitz et al.(1986) the studies in this field have been carried out gradually. However, most studies set foot in the field of general foreign language anxiety. In1999, Saito et al first put forward the concept of "Foreign Language Reading Anxiety" to clarify its relationship with general foreign language anxiety.What’s more, they designed a "Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale" to test the subjects’reading anxiety levels. However, this meaningful study has not been given sufficient attention in China, and few studies focused on the foreign language reading anxiety, let alone the studies on the relationship between foreign language reading anxiety and reading strategies.Based on Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, the present study aims to investigate the state of English reading anxiety experienced by junior high school students and the use of reading strategies.90junior high school students of the ninth grade in Shijiazhuang No.8middle school are randomly chosen as the research subjects. And two questionnaires are employed to collect the data in this study, one is Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) the other is English Reading Strategies Inventory (ERSS). And all the data are analyzed by SPSS (17.0). The results indicate that junior high school students experienced high level of anxiety in the process of English reading and there is a significant negative correlation between foreign language reading anxiety and reading strategies. That is, the higher reading anxiety is experienced, the fewer strategies are employed by the subjects. Further analysis shows that different levels of reading-anxious students show different employment of reading strategies. It is known that conscious use of reading strategies will reduce the level of anxiety and improve students’ reading efficiency. The results of this study can urge teachers to pay more attention to students reading anxiety during reading teaching and take appropriate measures to practice reading strategies so as to improve their reading confidence and interest in reading.