M.A. Thesis:

Investigating the relationship between the reading anxiety،reading profciency ،strategy use and gender of EFL students

The present study was an attempt to determine the relationship between foreign language reading anxiety and reading proficiency, strategy use and gender of EFL students as well as the types of strategy uses and reading anxiety. To this end, FLRAS (Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale) was developed by Saito, et al. (1999) in order to measure participants’ level of anxiety in reading and English translation of SORS (The Survey of Reading Strategies) adapted from Mokhtari and Sheorey (2002). Participants’ responses (no =100) regarding their reading anxiety status and their strategy uses were collected through the two above-cited questionnaires. Students’ responses as to reading strategies when faced with anxiety-provoking contexts were categorized into three parts including Global, problem solving and support strategies and mapped on three reading anxiety types including “bottom up”, “top-down” and “classroom reading context”. In the first place, to examine the existence of a relationship between FL learners’ foreign language reading anxiety and reading proficiency, Spearman correlation was computed. The results of Spearman correlation coefficient indicated that there was a statistically significant correlation between foreign language reading anxiety and reading proficiency. Then, regarding the interaction of gender with reading anxiety conditions, the intention was to check if gender as a biological variable could significantly predict more reading anxiety among the targeted students. The results from Spearman correlation showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between gender types and reading anxiety case, which was a clue for a worse condition among female (M = 72.34) compared with male ( M = 65.41) students. Finally, in order to test the relationship between Iranian EFL learners' preferred reading strategies and their anxiety levels, Multinomial logit regression was used and it was proved that students with lower level reading anxiety indices would adopt problem solving strategies more compared with support strategies compared. In the end, possible implications concerning the three research questions in this study were discussed in the light of improving reading instructions provided for Iranian students.

Keywords: Reading Anxiety, Strategy use, Trait Anxiety, State Anxiety, Situational Anxiety, Reading Strategies