Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Of University English Majors: An Empirical Study

With the development of studies on the relationship between foreign language anxiety and specific aspects of foreign language learning, reading is proved also closely related to anxiety level. It is pointed out that foreign language reading anxiety is extremely different in an important way from general foreign language learning anxiety. A special instrument, Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale(FLRAS), is also introduced for measuring levels of foreign language reading anxiety, which has not been put into wide use or test.The present study takes 60 English majors in Xi’an International Studies University as the subjects and adopts FLRAS, TOEFL reading scores and background information questionnaire as instruments, employed to help collect data. By adopting the FLRAS, the present study attempts to explore the situation of reading anxiety among students whose mother language is Chinese, with English as their target second/foreign language, as well as to examine the relationship between foreign language reading anxiety and reading performance, with the ultimate purpose of finding out the possible sources of reading anxiety thus to provide practical advice for our English teachers dealing with reading tasks. Then the statistical methods from SPSS 18.0, such as descriptive analysis and correlation analysis are applied here to analyze the foreign language reading anxiety and its relationship with reading performance.The findings underline that English majors do experience anxiety when they are confronted with English reading tasks, and reading anxiety level is significantly positive correlated with reading performance among English majors. English majors tend to perform better if they feel anxious when reading English materials. The possible sources from which reading anxiety may have been caused are such factors as lack of reading strategies, pressure of time limit set by the reading exercises or reading tests, low self-evaluation or low self-confidence on reading ability.