A Study Of Correlations Between Students' English Reading Anxiety And Reading Achievement In Junior Middle School

The idea of "people-oriented" education and the development of humanistic psychology have attracted unprecedented attention to the emotional factors of junior high school students learning English.English reading is an important part of English learning.Students 'reading anxiety affects students' reading performance.Many scholars study reading anxiety,but most of them focus on college students or high school students.There are correlation between few studies on reading anxiety in junior high school students.Therefore,taking Jinshawan School attached Zhanjiang No.1 Middle School as an example,the author studies the English reading anxiety and English reading achievement in junior high school students,and finds out the root causes of English reading anxiety in junior high school students,and puts forward better suggestions to help English teachers do better reading teaching.Based on Krashen's input hypothesis and emotional filtering hypothesis,the author randomly selected 269 students from the seventh,eighth and ninth grades of Jinshawan School attached to Zhanjiang No.1 Middle School,and adopted quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct questionnaires and interviews.The questionnaire is based on Hortwitz et al.'s foreign language reading anxiety scale.The questionnaire includes three dimensions: anxiety caused by lack of confidence and interest,anxiety about cultural background,and anxiety about text comprehension.The English reading score is the first semester's mid-term examination score of the 2017-2018 school year.In addition,the author uses the statistical package of social science(SPSS 22.0)to analyze the data and draw conclusions.The three research questions in this study are(1)What is the overall situation of anxiety among junior high school students in the process of reading English? Are there any gender and grade differences?(2)Is there any correlation between reading anxiety and English reading achievement in junior high school students,and if so,how?(3)What are the causes of English reading anxiety?The results show(1)English reading anxiety is common in junior high school students.No significant gender difference is in reading anxiety and reading performance between male and female students.There are significant differences in reading anxiety among students in Grades 7,8 and 9,and the eighth grade students have the highest anxiety.(2)There are significant differences in reading anxiety among the lower group,the medium group and the high group of junior middle school students.A negative correlation is between English reading achievement and English reading anxiety.The three dimensions of English reading anxiety are negatively related to the reading scores of students in the three grades.Among them,the dimension of lack of confidence and interest has the greatest influence;(3)Based on the above research,we found that the main causes of English reading anxiety in junior high school students are weak motivation,lack of basic knowledge,low interest in English reading of English language,and low degree of language ambiguity tolerance,lack of strategies and cultural background knowledge in English reading.Based on the above research results,in order to encourage English teachers to pay attention to students 'reading anxiety status and influencing factors,and help students to reduce reading anxiety and improve students' reading confidence and reading interest,the author puts forward several practical suggestions: guiding students to correctly understand English reading anxiety;helping students establish self-confidence,reducing emotional filtering;creating a relaxed and harmonious English classroom and reading atmosphere;actively carrying out autonomous cooperative learning;strengthening cultural background knowledge learning,improving humanistic comprehensive literacy and so on.