The Intervention Study Of English Readinganxiety On Rural Middle School

Since the1970s, with the focus in the study of foreign language teaching shifted from howto teach to how to learn, much attention has been paid to the learner’s individual differences,in which the impact of individual emotional factors on foreign language learners is causinggreat concern among the foreign language teaching researchers, and anxiety is regarded as themost important of the emotional factors. As studies of foreign language reading anxiety inChina started late, the researches on how to relieve the English reading anxiety are few andfar between, and even fewer are the researches of the effect of English reading strategyutilization on reading anxiety. Therefore this study, from the perspective of humanisticpsychology and based on Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis and Tobias’ LanguageLearning Model, conducted an investigation into English reading anxiety of a rural juniorhigh school second year students by means of the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale(FLRAS) and English Reading Strategy Scale (ERSS) and attempted to reduce the students’English reading anxiety through promoting the students’ application of English readingstrategies.This study, with81students from two parallel classes of Grade Two in a junior highschool in Anhui Province as the objects of research, investigated into their English readinganxiety and utilization of reading strategies through questionnaires, and adopting the Englishreading comprehension testing papers of Anhui Province Senior High School EntranceExamination of English before and after the experiment, collected and analyzed the test dataobtained by SPSS17.0and did special analysis of the statistical results.This survey finds out that reading anxiety really exist and the rural junior high school studentsrarely use English reading strategies in their English learning. The statistical results show thatthere is a significant negative correlation between English reading anxiety and reading scores,that is, the higher the students’ English reading anxiety, the lower their English readingachievement. It is proved that there is a significant positive correlation between the usefrequency of reading strategies and reading scores, that the correlation between use frequency of reading strategies and reading anxiety is negative and that reading anxiety and readingscores are negatively correlated in a notable way. Therefore the correlations among the threefactors are pairwise. After a semester of the experiment on English reading strategies teaching,the junior high school students succeeded in adapting to different reading strategies inaccordance with different reading tasks. The applied English reading strategies not onlystrengthened their autonomy of English learning, but also effected positive changes in theiremotional attitude in the process of English reading, gradually reducing their reading anxietyand irritable mood and completing their reading in a good state of mind.The results of this study confirms that, this kind of teaching mode based on developingstudents’ reading strategies has favorable effects in junior high school English readingteaching. For junior high school students, they are supposed to expand their vocabulary andsubject knowledge and build up the consciousness of accumulating cultural knowledge tolower their reading anxiety and improve their English reading efficiency and performance.Therefore, the teaching mode adopted in the experiment and suggestions put forward in thisstudy can work for teachers of English in rural junior high schools in dealing with Englishreading anxiety on the part of their students.