On the relationship between anxiety and reading in English as a foreign language among Korean university students in Korea

Abstract

The major purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between anxiety and reading in English as a foreign language (EFL). An additional purpose was to investigate whether different EFL reading tasks aroused differential levels of anxiety. A total of 114 Korean students in Freshman English courses at Kyungpook National University (Taegu, Korea) participated in the study. Subjects' anxiety levels were measured through the Korean State Anxiety Inventory (KSAI), the Korean Test Anxiety Inventory (KTAI), and the Korean Cognitive Interference Questionnaire (KCIQ). Three instruments were employed to assess subjects' EFL reading. First, the Reading Comprehension Task (ROT) consisted of two English passages each followed by comprehension and sentence verification questions and a written recall task. Second, the Cloze Test (CT) was comprised of thirty-two deletions which required intraclausal, interclausal, or intersentential processing for clozure. Finally, eighteen subjects, matched on English vocabulary knowledge, were asked to think-aloud while reading an English text and later to recall information from the text. The relationship between anxiety and RCT/CT performance, the relationship between anxiety and recall/strategy use as tapped by the Think-Aloud Task (TAT), and the relationship between reading assessment formats and anxiety level were examined through correlational analyses, repeated-measures ANOVAs, and t-tests. The main findings were as follows: (1) worry cognitions as measured by the KTAI's Worry Subscale and the KCIQ were inversely related to recall and cloze performance, particularly deletions requiring intersentential processing; (2) more anxious subjects used more often strategies for Developing Awareness and Accepting Ambiguity, but less frequently those for Establishing Intersentential Ties and Using Background Knowledge; and (3) the TAT and the CT provoked the highest levels of anxiety as measured by the KSAI and KCIQ, respectively. Since anxiety was found to have the potential to hamper reading processes and outcomes, the classroom teacher ought to identify the sources of anxiety which students may experience while reading. In IX addition, students’ anxiety should be alleviated so that they can utilize fully already acquired linguistic and prior knowledge in their attempt to make sense of what they read