An Empirical Research Of English Reading Anxiety Among Senior High School Students

The period of Senior high school is of extreme importance for English learning.Besides,reading is very significant in English learning.The language experts,including Satio,aslo agree that reading ability is the foundation of listening,speaking and writing.As a result,how to cultivate the students' reading ability is the focus of the language experts and the teachers.More and more attention has been paid to learners and their reading emotion.The factors which have different effects on reading attract more attention.Reading is a complex psychological process in which many affect factors will make a big difference to it,among which anxiety is one of the obstacles.Therefore,The study on reading anxiety has been abundant both in domestic and abroad.However,most of the subjects are university students or vocational college students while such studies on the senior high school students are few,let alone the freshmen in high school.Because of the different region,subjects and perspective,the contents of the study about reading anxiety are various.Furthermore,according to the survey,there are two thirds of the students considering reading to be the most difficult.It is obvious that necessary help are needed for the students in the aspect of reading.Therefore,the author determines to do some research on English reading anxiety of freshmen in senior middle School in order to explore some effective strategies to help students relieve the English reading anxiety.The thesis aims to have a good knowledge of English reading anxiety,taking 240 freshmen in senior school as subjects.By means of questionnaire and interview,the author uses SPSS 17.0 to analyze the data,including the reliability assessment,descriptive analysis,comparison of means,Pearson correlation analysis and so on.And the findings are as follows:(1)English reading anxiety is a common problem among senior one students.There is no significant difference between male and female students.(2)There is a significant difference between students' English reading grades and their English reading anxiety level.(3)Students' English reading anxiety level and their English reading grades have a negativecorrelation.That is to say,the students who have higher level of English reading anxiety tend to get lower English reading grades.(4)English reading anxiety level is negatively related to reading patterns.And the patterns of inferring and choosing main ideas which are related to further understanding are the most obvious.(5)The main causes of the English reading anxiety are various,among which lack of confidence ranks the first.Based on the study above,the suggestions which can help relieve the students' reading anxiety can be listed as follows: make students be aware of the normal existence of foreign language reading anxiety;help students build up self-confidence;let students learn and read in a pleasant atmosphere;conduct cooperative learning;enlarge students' vocabulary;get students to know more about the western cultures;give some instructions about the reading strategies.