A Survey Of English Reading Anxiety Of High School Students Based On Bloom’s Taxonomy Mitigation Strategies

English Curriculum Standards for High Schools was promulgated by Chinese Ministry of Education in2005. It emphasizes the cultivation of students’ comprehensive language abilities, including language skills, language knowledge, emotion and attitude, learning strategies and cultural awareness. The notion of paying attention to students’ affective factors and improving their humanistic quality is also advocated in the new curriculum standards. In addition, With the tendency of the focus shifting from studying how teachers teach to how students learn, affective factor, as one of the most important elements influencing learning proficiency, receives more and more attention. Although many researches have been done in language-skill-specific anxiety, researches on English reading anxiety don’t receive much attention compared with other skills like listening and speaking. Thus there is great room to investigate English reading anxiety among high school students, which will provide suggestions and guidance for reforming English teaching as well as reducing students’ English reading anxiety.The present study aims to explore English reading anxiety among high school students in Hubei. Questionnaire and English reading tests are adopted to collect data. Analysis of the data manifests the following results:Firstly, English reading anxiety widely exists among high school students. Secondly, the overall English reading anxiety is negatively correlated with subjects’ English reading achievements. Thirdly, The English reading anxiety is negatively correlated with four kinds of reading materials, of which exposition is the highest. Finally, there exists significant gender difference in the perceiving of English reading anxiety. Male students are more anxious about English reading than their female counterparts. According to the results and analysis, the thesis applies six classification skills of the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy to mitigating students’ English reading anxiety, i.e. knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. On the other hand, the thesis puts forward some suggestions for high school students:forming proper understanding about English reading, increasing the quantity of input and increasing the frequency of English reading practice.The whole thesis is composed of six parts. Chapter one gives a brief introduction of this study. Background of the present research, purpose and significance of the study as well as the framework are all elaborated. Chapter two is a review of the existing literature:literature related to reading anxiety at home and abroad, with its emphasis on the factors leading to reading anxiety. Definitions and classifications of anxiety are also presented. Meanwhile, Bloom’s Taxonomy Mitigation Strategies is expounded. Chapter three touches upon the design of this study:information on participants, selected materials, adopted instruments, data collection. Chapter four is the main body of the study. It firstly conducts a preliminary analysis of the reliability of the adopted scale, and then a series of results obtained from quantitative method are revealed. In addition, corresponding analysis are also included trying to find out the factors leading to English reading anxiety. Chapter five applies six classification skills of the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy to mitigating students’English reading anxiety based on the results and analysis. Chapter six is the conclusion of the study. With four findings offered in the current study, the thesis presents some suggestions and limitations for future study in this field.