An Investigation Into The Effect Of Foreign Language Reading Anxiety And Personality Tendencies (Extroversion-Introversion) On Senior One Students’ English Reading Achievement

Foreign language anxiety refers to foreign language learners’ or second language learners’ emotional performance of fear and nervousness in the language learning process. Generally, foreign language education has two goals:one is to make students master the basic knowledge, and the other is to develop the students’ humanistic literacy. Most Chinese students spend much time learning English but make little progress. That many teachers ignore the emotional activities and only stress memorization of words and grammar explanations is probably the case. The purpose of our education is to help students become self-directed or autonomous learners. In this case, it is of great significance to teach students to learn automatically and effectively. By researching the potential mental changes and offering progressive coping strategies, a comparatively comfortable and safe environment is under urgent construction. In the information era, reading is not only linguistically valuable, but also necessary for adequate function, and it is no exception to Chinese students. Thus, enhancing students’ reading ability in a foreign language is very important and also appears greatly urgent. By exploring the correlation of reading anxiety and reading achievement, of personality tendency and reading achievement and of reading anxiety and personality tendency, the researcher hopes to theoretically increase an empirical study to the target field and verify given suppositions, especially the study in senior high school.This research studied the effect of foreign language reading anxiety and personality tendencies on the reading achievement as well as the sources of reading anxiety, focusing on the Senior One students. Most of the similar researches are done among college students at home and abroad and most studies show the significant negative correlation between reading anxiety and reading achievement. However, the personality tendencies’ correlation with reading achievement is controversial and the sources of reading anxiety are also uncertain. The research questions are:1) What’s the basic situation of the participants’ reading anxiety and personality tendency?2) Does reading anxiety have any correlation with personality tendencies?3) What’s the effect of reading anxiety and personality on the reading achievement?4) What are the sources of reading anxiety?This research uses Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS), Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ), background information questionnaire and interviews to collect data and uses SPSS 17.0 to undergo further analysis. Results show that the main effect of personality tendency on reading achievement is no significant and the participants’ personality tendency has no correlation with the reading achievement. The introvert and extrovert learners have equal chances to develop cognitive academic language ability. The reading sources of the participants’ reading anxiety mainly come from students’ low confidence and low self-efficacy, low-level language processing, unfamiliar basic vocabulary and grammar and learning motivation. Firstly, the main cause comes from students’ low confidence and low self-efficacy. Secondly, most students tend to take low-level language processing, which significantly influences the text comprehension holistically. The vicious circle is the increasing effort and decreasing speed. Thirdly, the basic vocabulary and grammar matter a lot. The result shows that students show high anxiety because of script apprehension. Fourthly, the learners have not enough knowledge about the target language, which leads to difficulty in reading. Lastly, motivation indirectly reflects students’ anxiety. Suggested coping strategies are provided accordingly. The limitation of the research and suggestions for future research are illustrated in the last part to offer a reference to future researches.