A Study On English Reading Anxiety Of Non-English Majors

Abundant researches have affirmed that anxiety as an important emotional factor had a great influence on English learning, as well as in English reading. Researchers abroad commenced to pay attention to reading anxiety until the 1990 s. Most researches on English reading anxiety mainly concentrated on the relationship between reading anxiety and English learning anxiety. Besides, the gender difference and age difference was emphasized especially. There was barely research focused on the relationship between reading anxiety and text types. In order to deepen the understanding of English reading anxiety, and then improve the reading efficiency on the part of Chinese,this study mainly focuses on the relationship between text types and English reading anxiety, and the specific relationship between reading anxiety of the different text types and reading comprehension.This thesis is composed of six chapters. The brief introduction to this research which including the research background, research purpose and significance of this research is developed firstly in chapter one. Chapter two reviews the relevant literatures for the foreign language reading anxiety aboard and at home. Chapter three makes a representation to the research design, which mainly contains the research participants, reading material selection, instrument design and the data collection.Chapter four presents the detailed discussion and results of the research in the basis of the collected data. Chapter five states the major findings of this research based on the analysis of the collected data, and then the pedagogical implications to English reading teaching and learning are provided as well. Finally, the author indicates the limitations in this study, and makes the suggestions to the future research.Participants randomly selected in this study are eighty non-English major students from Shandong Normal University, in which forty of them are from science majors and the others are coming from liberal art majors. In order to fulfill this research, six passages are selected under a serious standard and criterion from Reading Comprehension in College English Test Band 4, and each text type including twopassages. The author employs the semantic differential scale in this study to find out participates' attitude toward these six passages. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between reading anxiety and text types, as well as the relationship between reading anxiety and reading comprehension, and then put forward the targeted teaching suggestions for reading. Therefore, this study mainly answers two questions:1) What is the relationship between reading anxiety and text types? 2) What is the relationship between reading anxiety and reading comprehension? Data in this study is collected by reading comprehension test of College English Test Band 4 and the semantic differential scales, and then analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The research results show that: 1) The reading anxiety level of narration is the lowest and the argumentation the highest, while the exposition is in secondary level for all the participants. The characteristic of the text type is the possible reason for this phenomenon. There exists a significant difference in exposition and argumentation,while narration has basically no difference between two groups of participates. The fact shows that the reading anxiety level of liberal art students is much higher than that of science students in terms of exposition, while in terms of argumentation the reading anxiety level of science students is much higher than that of liberal art students. The characteristics of their major curriculum, the logical thinking pattern and the theme of the passages may be the possible reasons for this phenomenon. 2) There exists a significant negative correlation between reading anxiety and reading comprehension,in which the correlation of the narrative passage is the strongest, while expositive passage is the weakest. In terms of two groups of participants, the negative correlation of the science students is much stronger than the liberal art students, that is to say, the science students are more likely to be influenced by the reading anxiety than the liberal art students do. Possible reasons for this phenomenon are the long-time unfair evaluation from the outside and their low self- efficacy.This study furthers the present studies and understanding about reading anxiety,and has a significant pedagogical implication on English reading teaching. Based on this study, the research findings are helpful for English teachers to take targeted andspecific measurements according to their different majors and different level of reading anxiety of the text types, in order to help students to reduce the reading anxiety and improve reading comprehension efficiency finally.