Reading anxiety in EFL context : a study on Jordanian students at Yarmouk University

Abstract

In the last two decades, investigating the sources of foreign language anxiety has increasingly attracted the attention of many researchers in the field of foreign language teaching. However, the sources of anxiety that influence the acquisition of certain specific language skills such as reading have rarely been investigated. Moreover, mixed method research has not been used to investigate the sources of foreign language reading anxiety. Thus, the current study responds to the call of the original work of Saito et al (1999) and the necessity to utilize the specific design and variant of mixed method research, which aims to explore and understand the sources that contribute to reading anxiety faced by EFL students at Yarmouk University, Jordan. It is a study of two consecutive phases. The first phase of the study is a qualitative exploration of the sources of English language reading anxiety for which semi-structured interviews and diaries were collected from six informants with different levels of English language proficiency. The second,is a quantitative phase that followed up on the qualitative phase for the purpose of expanding and generalizing the results of the generated themes. In the quantitative phase, a crosssectional survey of 1500 number of undergraduate students who were taking Basic English courses was administered. A total of 1006 questionnaires was valid for analysis. However, only 408 questionnaires were randomly chosen according to the criteria of quota sampling techniques. The findings of the study revealed that there were two aspects of foreign language reading anxiety: personal factor and text feature. Under the concept of personal factor there were also two main sources of foreign language reading anxiety, namely afraid of making errors and worry about reading effects. On the other hand, there were three main sources of foreign language reading anxiety under the concept of text feature, namely unknown vocabulary, unfamiliar topic, and unfamiliar culture. The five main sources of foreign language reading anxiety were arranged according to their occurrences and percentages in both phases. As a consequence, an instrument that elicits foreign language reading anxiety was generated to measure the level of foreign language reading anxiety. In addition, recommendations were proposed and future researches were directed too in this area.