A Portrait of Students' Anxiety in Reading English Texts
Abstract
Reading is a very important thing to learn because it will determine success in school, university, and everyday life (Ntereke & Ramoroka, 2017). When the reading process takes place, many factors influence it such as affective, cognitive, and linguistic factors. However, most studies focus on cognitive and linguistic factors (Ismail, 2015; Zhou, 2017; Ashohbani, 2018; Madronero, 2019; Sharon & Parilah, 2020). In other words, there are very few studies examining the affective aspects of reading such as reading anxiety (Katzier et.al, 2018). The purpose of this research was to determine reading anxiety and the factors that influence it. This research used a qualitative approach with a case study research design. The population in this research was the eighth grade students of Islamic junior high school in Riau province, Indonesia. They consisted of 4 classes with a total of 110 students. 56 students were samples taken by using the purposive sampling technique. This research was conducted in August 2021. In collecting data, the researcher used two questionnaires and interviews to determine the level of students' anxiety when reading and the factors that influence it. Descriptive analysis through SPSS 21.00 was used in this research to analyze the questionnaire data, while the interview data were analyzed using qualitative data analysis from Cresswell (2012). The results showed that the students' reading anxiety level is at a moderate level (68% of students admitted). In addition, two factors that affect students' anxiety when reading English texts are text features and personal factors. Under the concept of text features, there are three sources of reading anxiety which include unknown vocabulary (63.7% of students agree), unfamiliar culture (54% of students agree), and unfamiliar topics 8(59.9% of students agree). On the other hand, in the concept of personal factors, there are two sources of reading anxiety, namely fear of making mistakes (57.9% of students agree) and worries about the effect of reading (41.3% of students agree).
Keywords: Anxiety; Reading.
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