Perception on English Reading Comprehension Anxiety of Third Year EFL Students at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Cambodia

Abstract

ABSTRACT            The purposes of this study were to investigate the perceptionsof third year EFL students at the Institute of Foreign Languages (IFL), Cambodia on their levels of English reading anxiety, and how they were related to gender and reading comprehension, and to explore the sources of their English reading anxiety. A group of 232 junior students participated in the current study. A multiple-method research methodology was employed by using a sequential design, beginning with a quantitative approach followed by a qualitative approach. For the quantitative stage, two survey questionnaires adapted from the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale by Saito, Garza and Horwitz (1999) were administered to the participants. For the qualitative stage, a semi-structured interview was created and used to identify the sources of English reading anxiety from ten bottom list anxiety score students and ten top list anxiety score students. The quantitative findings revealed that third year EFL students perceived they had a low level of English reading anxiety and the level of English reading anxiety between males and females was found to have no significant difference. Moreover, the result from the questionnaire showed that third year EFL students perceived that their reading anxiety had a moderate effect on their reading comprehension. From the qualitative analysis, the sources of English reading anxiety were identified and categorized into six main categories. They were linguistic features of texts, environment, personal traits of readers, physical look of texts, time constraint and teachers.