Types of Reading Anxiety in Association to Reading Strategy at Junior High School Setting

Rizal Arisman

English Education Study Program, Universitas Dayanu Ikhsanuddin, Baubau, Indonesia

ABSTRACT: This research determines the association between three dimensions of reading anxiety and reading strategy. It uses a quantitative approach of correlational design. 146 eighth-graders students in junior high school were involved as the sample. Two kinds of questionnaires were applied to obtain the research data. The EFL Reading Anxiety Scale (EFLRAI) was used to find out the students’ reading anxiety, and the Language Learning Strategy Questionnaire (LLSQ) was utilized to acquire the students’ responses related to their learning strategy. The research data were analyzed using descriptive testing to acquire the mean score and Pearson Correlation Product Moment to gain the correlation score. This study reveals that there was a high level of the top-down, the bottom-up, classroom, and the overall reading anxiety, while the students applied a moderate level of reading strategy. The result of the correlation testing revealed that top-down and bottom-up reading anxieties gained a low relationship on reading strategy. However, classroom reading anxiety had a low correlation on reading strategy. In addition, all reading anxieties separately and simultaneously have a positive relationship towards reading strategy, in which classroom reading anxiety obtains the highest relationship on reading strategy with a score of correlation was 0.207. This study contributes to aid the teacher in recognizing the students’ reading anxiety that must be reduced to gain better reading strategies.

KEYWORDS: Top-down, bottom-up, classroom, anxiety, strategy

I. INTRODUCTION

Studying foreign languages is crucial to many nations’ educational systems because political, business, academic motives, and medical conversation are needed. Many different languages are spoken everywhere, but English is one of the most widely spoken. In Indonesia, English is a foreign language to learn in schools. While studying English, learner must master four core skills: listening, speaking, writing, and reading. Reading is the essential ability language skill of the four primary skills. Student success in the scholarly level relies on the potential to recite and understand written English. They comprehend any passage with a reading aid because studying is a technique of acquiring data from what they see.

Teaching students to examine English textual content is not an easy thing. A preliminary observation in a middle school found  that  there  had  been  a  few  issues  students encountered in reading activities in EFL class; for instance, a few students avoided activities in the English reading class, or at the least, now not they are enthusiastic about reading in English. In a few instances, avoid reading materials in English (Jalongo & Hirsh, 2010). Within the context of language study and teaching, reading is fundamentally vital for language learning (Wang, 2016). Ibhar (2022) argues that for the purpose of formally developing students’ language skills, the most important activity that takes place in the classroom is reading. In this regard, by reading, language skills can be developed and expanded, and pupils can get a deeper comprehension of the language’s linguistic features (such as its grammar, discourse structure, and vocabulary). Through reading, students can access much information about the target language and culture (Chen & Intaraprasert, 2014). This fact is quite proper for learners, as most of their time is spent reading academic documents and textbooks (Sani & Chik, 2011).

Some issues emerged in the students during the researchers observed the English learning process. They score poorly after doing the test from the teacher. Besides, they are unable to recognize unfamiliar English words. This condition is dues to the fact that the students who lack vocabulary commandments do not recognize the types of reading strategies and when they should use them. Students also do not feel comfortable when the text’s title is unfamiliar. It bothers students when they encounter many phrases whose meanings are not always precise. It makes students uncomfortable when the teacher points up a mistake in speech or interpretation. Students are unable to apprehend the main idea of a particular paragraph. All of these facts cause reading anxiety. Reading anxiety is a personal phobia associated with the act of reading. Anxiety makes the learning process more difficult. Reading anxiety must be resolved because it can influence their reading ability. It prevents students from achieving their learning goals. Coming from those problems, the researchers are interested in researching the connection between the anxiety the students feel in reading and reading strategy in EFL students in junior high school students.

As far as the researchers could find, there are not many research references that discuss the relationship between learning anxiety and learning strategy, especially in Indonesia at this time. In addition, there is still a lack of research focusing on specific English skills in line with the relationship between anxiety and strategy, reading skill for instance. Research from Mohammadi et al. (2013) focused on the relationship between language learning strategy and revealed that cognitive, compensation, and social strategy meaningfully correlated to language anxiety. Meanwhile, the more specific skill of English related to anxiety and strategy was observed by Blasco (2016), which researched the connection between writing anxiety, writing self-efficacy, and metacognitive writing strategy. He took six high school students in Spain as the research participant. His research discovered that metacognitive strategy negatively correlated with writing anxiety. Referring to those facts and providing some information on the aspect of language learning anxiety and strategy in the more specific skill of English; therefore, the researchers conduct this research to solve the problem of whether there is any relationship between reading anxiety and reading strategy. This research is expected to be able to be a reference for further researchers to investigate the same aspect as this research discusses but in the different skills of English, such as listening or speaking, or even to enrich the research finding in writing as the previous research has been done or in reading as this research did.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1. Reading Strategy

O’Malley & Chamot (1990) classified reading into three categories metacognitive strategy, cognitive strategy, and social strategy as they are explained as follows:

• Cognitive strategies are considered as mental processes which are considered related to the processing of information to learn, acquiring, storing, retrieving, or using information (Williams & Burden, 1997).
• Metacognitive strategies include expertise the intent for applying a selected context and assessing its usefulness in phrase of adequacy and effectiveness in this context (Karbalaei, 2011). In reading, the strategies under the metacognitive category are: (1) I recheck and evaluation my apprehend after reading the textual content; (2) read I try to investigate what is actually my issues; and (3) I attempt to be realizing which phrase or grammar rule is inflicting me the most hassle. This way, I am able to pay different attention to the phrase or rule whilst reading and practicing. The above strategies also involve self-awareness as mentioned above.
• Social reading strategies are a fixed of methods that may be used to permit the pupils to come to be lively contributors in the magnificence through interactions with others and sharing the expertise they possess.

2.2. Reading Anxiety

Guimba & Alico (2015) devide reading anxiety into three categories, as presented in the following:

• Top-down reading anxiety indicates that most students are anxious when: (1) the pupil is cannot perceive the slightest ideas (details) in the text; (2) pupil do not understand the essence of the message; and (3) the pupil is unable to recognize the primary idea of a paragraph, a paragraph These findings suggest that students with high reading anxiety are caused by their inability to understand and synthesize basic textual information and concepts.
• Bottom-up reading anxiety affirms that students are often worried when: (1) pupils are unable to tell the meaning of words they think they have heard before; (2) pupils encounter a large number of words with unclear meanings; (3) they find that students have words many have unclear meanings; and (4) they have difficulty pronouncing unfamiliar words at this time. The problem is simply a vocabulary problem.
• When it comes to reading in the classroom pupils said they were nervous when teachers correct their mistakes in pronunciation or translation. Debugging is undoubtedly the most troubling part of the class for them.

III.  RESEARCH METHOD

This research employed a quantitative approach with a correlational design. It examined the relationship between reading anxiety and reading strategy. The independent variable was reading anxiety which was focused on top-down reading anxiety, bottom-up reading anxiety, and classroom reading anxiety, while the dependent variable was the reading strategy.

There were 146 students involving as the sample of this research selected using a purposive sampling. The samples consisted of 94 female (64%) and 52 male (52%) from the eighth-grade students. The students were selected from three junior high schools in Baubau, Southeast Sulawesi province, Indonesia. The age of the students ranged 13-14 years old. In their school, English was studies once a week with the learning duration took 90 minutes.

The standardized questionnaires were utilized in acquiring the research data. The reading anxiety questionnaire adapted EFL Reading Anxiety Inventory (EFLRAI) by Zoghi (2012). It had 23 statements divided into three categories of reading anxiety, which are top-down reading anxiety (1-6), bottom-up reading anxiety (7-17), and classroom reading anxiety (18-23). Those were three types of reading anxiety observed in this research. The questionnaire of the reading strategy used a questionnaire of Language Learning Strategy Questionnaire (LLSQ) in reading developed by Setiyadi & Mahpul (2016) containing 20 statements, including 11 items of cognitive strategies (1-11), seven items of metacognitive strategies (12-17), and three items of social strategies (18-20). A Likert scale was used to rate the students’ answers for both questionnaires with different options. The EFLRAI applied the options range from totally disagree (1), disagree (2), agree (3), and totally agree (4). On the other hand, the LLSQ used options of the scale range from never (1), rarely (2), often (3), and always (4).

IV. RESULTS

4.1. Reading Anxiety

The reading anxiety level results from the questionnaire of EFLRAI, which is distributed to 146 eighth graders to fill in based on what they feel while learning English reading. From 23 items with four Likert scale options, its result reveals that the mean score is 2.73 with a standard deviation is 0.39. Therefore, it is implied that the students have high reading anxiety levels. The frequency distribution of the students and the percentage who achieve each overall reading anxiety level can be seen in the following table.

Table 1. Distribution of Overall Reading Anxiety

In table 1, the lowest frequency of students is one student, or 0.68%, who achieves a low reading anxiety level. Meanwhile, the highest reading anxiety level in which the students experience the most frequency is 96, or 65.75%. Strengthening the mean score explained above, and it can be assumed that the eighth graders at junior high school in Baubau get high anxiety in learning English reading.

In addition, the mean scores achieved by each reading anxiety, including the overall reading anxiety, are shown in the following figure. It is to discover which type of reading anxiety is the highest or lowest.

Table 2. Distribution of Overall Reading Anxiety

According to table 2, bottom-up reading anxiety obtains the highest reading anxiety level, with a mean score of 2.82 and a standard deviation of 0.46. In comparison, the lowest mean score is achieved by classroom reading anxiety, with a mean score of 2.48 and a standard deviation of 0.64. From the data, it is figured out that among the three types of reading anxiety, the eighth graders’ most reading anxiety is bottom-up reading anxiety.

4.2. Reading Strategy

The reading strategy score in this study is obtained from LLSQ containing 20 statements. It was used to figure out the level of reading strategy the students used. The calculation of the score obtained indicates that the student’s average score is 2.59, and the standard deviation is 0.46. Thus, the students’ reading strategy is moderate or sometimes used reading strategy in learning English reading.

4.3. Normality and Linearity Test

The normality test is utilized to ensure the data are normally distributed. It is examined using 1 sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The analysis results a significance score that is 0.200. Since it is greater than 0.05, thus, the data has been determined to follow a normal distribution. Meanwhile, the linearity test is done to determine whether the variables have a linear relationship. The test results showed a significant score that is 0.87. Therefore, the data are concluded to have a linear relationship.

4.4. Relationship between Reading Anxiety and Reading Strategy

A Pearson correlation product moment test reveals the correlation between each reading anxiety, including the overall reading anxiety and the reading strategy. Each type of reading anxiety is calculated first concerning the reading strategy. The same method is then used to calculate an overall reading anxiety score based on the strength of the association and the coefficient relationship to the reader’s chosen strategy of reading. It is applied to figure out which type of reading anxiety has the highest or the lowest relationship to the reading strategy, as the result of calculation is shown in the following table.

Table 2. Distribution of Overall Reading Anxiety

The data presented in the table above indicate that all types of reading anxiety, with reading anxiety at once, have a negative relationship to the reading strategy. Those results reveal that the lower the reading anxiety experienced by the students, the better the reading strategy they have. Furthermore, two kinds of reading anxieties achieve a very low level in their relationship toward reading strategy and two other strategies are low. The lowest relationship is obtained by top-down reading anxiety toward reading strategy, which achieves -0.074 or -7.4%. It means that for every 1 point of reading, top-down reading anxiety reduces, increasing the reading strategy by as much as 7.4%. While the highest relationship is achieved by classroom reading anxiety toward reading strategy with the correlation score (R) is -0.201 or -20.1%, which means when the classroom reading anxiety reduces by 1 point, the reading strategy increases by 20.1%.

 V.   DISCUSSION

The research results indicate that the students have high level reading anxiety. Sari (2017) asserts that the higher the level of reading anxiety that is experienced, the fewer strategies are chosen by readers; conversely, the more strategies that learners utilize when reading, the lower the level of anxiety that is experienced by learners. The result of this research is similar to the finding of the research that is acquired by Bensalem (2020) who finds three factors underly reading anxiety: worry about comprehension, lack of satisfaction in reading ability, and unfamiliar phonics rules. In the contrary with this research, factors such as worrying about cultural aspect in text, lack of knowledge about idea expressed in the text, and figure out meaning of the familiar words are the most factors experienced by the students.

The level of correlation for each type and overall reading anxiety on reading strategy feature very low and low correlation. It means the reading anxiety does not affect more towards reading strategy. Since the correlation exists and is weak, other factors that may contribute to reading strategy can be learners’ motivation, attitude, time spend reading English materials, time spend doing English comprehension during English lessons in the classroom (Petrus & Md Shah, 2020), or differences in their reading ability (Mokhtarnia & Ghaffarzadeh, 2020).

As students’ levels of anxiety rise, their propensity to make use of reading strategy drops. It is because of anxiety was one of a learner factors that determined the students’ success in the learning activity, especially in writing (Han & Hiver, 2018). It is supported by Gardner & MacIntyre (1993) who emphasize that success in learning a second language depends on several factors, including those that come before and after the actual instruction, as well as the learner’s personality and background. Intelligence, language aptitude, learning strategies, attitudes, motivation, and anxiety are all examples of factors that can vary from person to person. Xu et al. (2022) also confirm that there are three primary factors that distinguish individuals: motivation, anxiety, and learning strategies factoring in language acquisition variables.

 VI.  CONCLUSION

In summary, this research indicated that the eighth graders achieved a high level of reading anxiety and a moderate level of reading strategy. The relationship between them presented a negative result. It meant the reading strategy gets better when the anxiety gets decreases. However, the result suggested the teacher or the educator must give their attention to the reading strategy since reading anxiety decreases when it increases. Teachers should apply a learning method that facilitates the reading strategy in the students’ learning activity. Students should be introduced to the reading strategy they possess to utilize in learning and reduce the reading anxiety they experience.

 VII.  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The researcher would like to address his gratitude to all sides who have provided time and place for this research to be conducted, especially the headmaster, English teacher, and students at junior high school in Baubau, Indonesia.

VIII.  DISCLOSURE

The author reports no conflicts of interest in this work.

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