Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research background
With the increasingly rapid development of economy around the world, cooperationand negotiation between different countries have increased correspondingly. English, as themost-widely applied “international language” has played an increasingly important anddominant role in the communication and collaboration process. It has become anindispensable tool and necessity for our country’s communication with other countries incommercial and trade activities. Mastering fluently a foreign language with English asrepresentative will add a competitive edge to the candidates who compete for demandingpositions in a company. So there exists an increasingly demand and necessity for studentsto master skillfully the English language in school and lay a solid foundation for theirfuture career path. English is currently a compulsory course in Chinese senior high schoolsand students as well as teachers and parents pay more and more attention to students’English grades even from elementary schools. The students in Senior High schools areunder more stress because English is a major subject in National College EntranceExamination, occupying the same position with Chinese and Mathematics. Within theEnglish examination, Reading Comprehension takes up on average 40% of the total scores.So the importance of reading comprehension is without doubt significant.
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1.2 Research Questions
In the past few decades, with the development of humanism psychology learners’emotional factors in foreign language acquisition have received more and more emphasis.Since the late 1970s, language theorists have begun to recognize the emotional factors inlanguage teaching and their focus of research has shifted from language learners’ rationalcognition to learners’ non-rational factors like anxiety, motivation, personality.(Guo &Wang, 2017) Anxiety is a subjective emotion which causes upset, nervous, worried andsuspecting emotion.(Eysenuck, 1979) It is a self-denial recognition and can be divided intothree categories: trait anxiety, state anxiety and situation specific anxiety. The readingcomprehension anxiety in foreign language acquisition belongs to the category of situationanxiety, which by definition refers to the anxious emotion in a particular situation or events,like classroom activities or examinations. Researchers like Horwitz (1986) in the 1980sdesigned FLCAS (foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale) and further divided thelanguage anxiety into three categories: Communication Anxiety, Examination Anxiety andNegative Evaluation Anxiety. Based on his design, in 1999, Satio and his colleaguesdesigned another anxiety measure scale FLRAS (Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale)to further explored the effects of anxiety in reading comprehension in greater details. Thisscale was designed specially for the purpose of measuring anxiety related to foreignlanguage reading comprehension and consists of 20 items. These items are scored on a5-point scale, covering a range from “strongly agree” to “strongly agree”. Aiming at toexplore the learners’ self-reports of anxiety in different aspects of reading comprehension.Also the researchers seek to record learners’ perception of difficulty in contrast to otherlanguage skills as speaking, listening and writing.
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，英语论文题目，英语论文题目 |
