A Study On English Reading Anxiety Level Of Senior Two Students

The National English Curriculum Standards of senior high school in China acclaim that much attention should be paid to students’affective factors in English learning and teaching. While in the present English teaching and learning in China, English reading anxiety in senior high schools have not attracted much attention from English teachers yet.On the basis of learning the relevant studies of foreign language reading anxiety both abroad and at home, this thesis aims to explore:1. whether English reading anxiety does exist among senior two students or not,2. whether there are some differences of English reading anxiety level between different genders,3. the potential sources of students’English reading anxiety, and also 4. the feasible solutions to alleviate the English reading anxiety level in senior high school English reading teaching. A total of 100 senior two students from the No.1 Middle School Attached to Central China Normal University participate in this research, and 47 of them are boy,53 of them are girls. The questionnaire adopted in this study is adapted from the original Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale which was created by Saito et al. in 1999. All the participants are required to finish a Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale in Chinese version, and then 10 of them are selected for the following interview randomly. The data is input, analyzed and disposed by the application of SPSS.20.0.The research results show that 1. senior two high school students do have different levels of English reading anxiety, and the English reading anxiety level is high in general, besides,9 of 20 items gain higher scores than the mean score whose contents may possibly be the main causes of students’English reading anxiety,2. the English reading anxiety level of female students is a little higher than that of male students, but the difference of English reading anxiety level between male group and female group is not significantly obvious,3. the main sources of senior two high school students’English reading anxiety are:lack of self-confidence, deficiency of basic English language knowledge, lacking cultural background knowledge of English-speaking countries, the false perception of the difficulty of English reading comprehension and lack of appropriate English reading strategies.Based on the research findings above, this thesis gives some suggestions on how to alleviate senior two high school students’ English reading anxiety level and also puts some implications on how to improve the efficiency of English reading effectively. First of all, English teachers should help their students to understand what is English reading anxiety, and then choose appropriate reading materials according to their students’ English level, enhance the training of English reading strategies, strengthen cross-cultural background knowledge teaching, and at last, English teachers should also help students to build up their self confidence in English reading.