A Correlative Study On English Reading Anxiety And Reading Comprehension Performance Of Senior High School Students In Rural Areas

Reading comprehension is a great important part in the process of English learning.It is closely related to the success of language learning.However,it is not rare to see that many students in rural area have poor reading performance.Apart from the reasons in terms of interest and motivation,anxiety in is also a commonly acknowledged reason.In recent years,though researches have given some attention to the relationship between English reading anxiety and English reading comprehension performance.However,most studies focus on college students,the studies on senior high school students especially those in rural areas are not quite sufficient.In fact,compared to cities,senior high school students in rural areas experience higher level of English reading anxiety because of the relatively poor teaching resource,the monotonous teaching method and the low learning motivation.Therefore,the present research is to study the relationship between English reading anxiety and English reading comprehension performance of senior high school students in rural areas.This study attempts to measure the level of English reading anxiety of senior high school students in rural areas,to detect the relationship to between the English reading anxiety and English reading comprehension performance and find out the causes influencing students' English reading anxiety in rural senior high school.It tries to answer the following three questions:(1)what is the foreign language reading anxiety level among senior high school students in rural areas?(2)What is the relationship between English reading anxiety and English reading comprehension performance?(3)What are the causes influencing students' English reading anxiety in rural senior high school?This study employs 112 senior high school students from Dongjiang Senior High School in Heyuan city which is located in rural area.All of them are asked to finish a Chinese version of FLRAS and conduct a reading comprehension test which is selected from their 2016 final exam and it contains four English reading passages with the total scores of 40.Besides,12 students are chosen from the participants to take the face-to-face interview.Software SPSS.19.0 was adopted for the statistical analysis of the data.Descriptive analysis was used to find out the mean,standard deviation and the levels of FLRA among the senior high students in rural area.The Pearson correlation analysis was employed to explore the relationship between the students' FLRA and their reading comprehension performance.One-way ANVOA is adopted to show whether there are some significant differences among different anxiety groups in reading comprehension scores.The findings show :(1)the senior high school students in rural areas really experience English reading anxiety when they are working English reading tasks.(2)There is a significant negative relationship between English reading anxiety and their English reading comprehension performance of senior high school students in rural areas.(3)The factors influences students' English reading anxiety in rural senior high school are classified into four kinds: lacking of confidence,insufficient vocabulary,lacking of interest and lacking of English culture.This study also provides some implications to the teacher in rural areas(1)the teacher should be aware of the existence and important of English reading anxiety and help the students to understand and reduce it.(2)It is necessary to build students' self-confidence.(3)It is important for students to enlarge the vocabulary.(4)The English teacher should pay attention to the reading atmosphere,reading content so as to stimulate the students' reading interest.(5)English culture should be strengthened.