The sources of foreign language reading anxiety of students in a Turkish EFL context

Anxiety has an important role in learning a foreign language and there is a growinginterest in how anxiety affects language learning. In the recent years, why and how anxietyinfluences the acquisition of certain skills like speaking, listening, writing and reading haveattracted the attention of many researchers. Among these skills, one area which little researchexists is the relationship between reading in a foreign language (FL) and anxiety.This study aimed at finding the sources of FL reading anxiety from the students?perspectives. For this purpose, 50 first year students at Anadolu University, English LanguageTeaching Department were taken as the subjects. In order to find out the sources of FLreading anxiety; first of all, whether the anxiety students feel is specific to FL reading, or partof general FL anxiety should be found. Therefore, Turkish versions of two scales were used inthis study. These are; Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) which wasdesigned to measure the general FL anxiety levels of the students and Foreign LanguageReading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) which was designed to measure the FL reading anxietylevels of the students. Since FLRAS did not have a Turkish version, this scale was translatedinto Turkish by using back translation method. The validity and reliability of this scale werecalculated in a pilot study with 332 students by applying a principle component analysis andCronbach?s α. The two scales used in this study were administered to students at differenttimes and as a result of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient analysis, FLreading anxiety was found as a phenomenon related to, but distinct from general FL anxiety.In order to find out the sources of FL reading anxiety, students were asked to keepdiaries for seven weeks on a weekly basis. Moreover, 50% of the subjects-that is 25- wereinterviewed to support the findings derived from the analyses of the diaries and explorewhether there was anything left that they wanted to express. The interviews were transcribedand both the diaries and interviews were analyzed by using The Constant ComparisonMethod.As a result of the analyses, three main sources of FL reading anxiety were identified ina Turkish EFL context. FL reading anxiety Turkish students experienced was caused by thepersonal factors, the reading text and the reading course. This study revealed that FL readinganxiety exists as a distinct phenomenon and students were experiencing reading anxiety whilereading in the target language due to some factors. Finally, implications of this study werediscussed and some suggestions for dealing with the FL reading anxiety were made.