Foreign language reading anxiety: Investigating English -speaking university students learning Chinese as a foreign language in the United States

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the foreign language reading anxiety among learners of Chinese in colleges in the United States. Early studies on foreign language anxiety had an obvious focus on the language skill of speaking (e.g., Aida, 1994; Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope, 1986; Phillips, 1992; Young, 1986) and the foreign language anxiety study related to other language skills such as reading, listening and writing have not drawn researchers’ attention until very recently (Cheng, Horwitz & Schallert, 1999; Saito et al., 1999; Vogely, 1998). Foreign language reading anxiety is a construct that is related to but distinct from general foreign language anxiety (Saito, Horwitz, & Garza, 1999; Sellers, 2000; Shi & Liu, 2006). Alphabetic and syllabic target languages such as English, Spanish, and Japanese have been studied in the foreign language reading anxiety research but logographic language has rarely been included. By including Chinese, a logographic language, as a target language in research on the foreign language reading anxiety, this study intended to expand the understanding of the nature of foreign language reading anxiety and also the reading process of Chinese as a foreign language. According to the sociocognitive perspective of reading (Bernhardt, 1991), reading is a meaning-reconstruction process where readers interact with not only the text-based components but also the extra-text components of a reading passage. Text-based components are such as word recognition, phonemic/graphemic decoding, and syntactic features. In reading a Chinese passage, learners of Chinese usually spend excessive time on word recognition due to the non direct relation between the form and the pronunciation of a Chinese character. Humans are limited in cognitive capacity (Eysenck, 1992). Therefore, after most of the cognitive capacity is used in dealing with word recognition, very little cognitive capacity is available for the activation of discourse knowledge, prior knowledge, and metacognition that deal with the extra-text components. The inefficient reading process might lead to reading anxiety among readers. Bernhardt (2005) pointed out that the role of affect such as anxiety had been neglected from the previous reading models, which might explain