The Influence Of Reading Anxiety On English Reading Proficiency Among Senior High School Students: An Empirical Study In A Middle School Of Northern Shaanxi

According to Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis,“Anxiety, tension, collisionand inferiority etc. can influence the quality of acquisition.”(Krashen,1985, p.125;Sun Jie,2009, p.144) Considered as an important affective variable, anxiety hascaught much attention from linguists. Since Horwitz etc. designed Foreign LanguageClassroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) in1940s, lots of research has been conducted onforeign language anxiety to explore its correlation with English proficiency. On thebasis of this, researchers further found that anxiety also existed in reading process andwas reflected as “low self-evaluation of reading ability and mental tension in reading”(MacIntyre&Gardner,1994, p.285). In order to explore reading anxiety more clearly,Satio et al designed Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) in1999forspecially investigating reading anxiety and its relation with reading proficiency.Although researchers have devoted much in this field, their studies indicated a lack ofcoverage on high school students.The present study investigated the influence of reading anxiety on readingproficiency among senior high school students by considering three individual factors(gender, native place and reading strategy use) which may lead to different levels ofreading anxiety. With negative correlation proved in this thesis, the author alsoadopted personal interviews for trying to find more sources of reading anxiety amongthose students and to help them improve their reading proficiency.60grade-two senior high school students were selected to test their readingproficiency and reading anxiety. The data were analyzed through SPSS15.0and themajor finds were as follows:(1) Foreign language reading anxiety generally existsamong senior high school students;(2) A significant negative relation exists betweenreading anxiety and reading proficiency;(3) Gender is not a factor leading to differentlevels of reading anxiety;(4) Native place is apparently an influencing factor that ruralstudents have much higher reading anxiety than urban students;(5) Reading strategyuse is also an influencing factor that less frequent strategy users have much higherreading anxiety than those frequent ones.