An Investigation on Reading Anxiety Across Gender

Abstract

Reading helps language users gain knowledge and empowers the users with the power of reasoning. The use of reading skills makes the language users depend on their communication skills. Reading comprehension is challenging as it requires the coordination of multiple linguistic and cognitive processes, word reading ability, working memory, inference generation, comprehension monitoring, vocabulary, and prior knowledge. Past studies revealed that there is gender difference in the use of language learning strategies. More studies were suggested to investigate gender differences when it comes to language learning difficulties; especially reading comprehension. This study explores the reading comprehension strategies among male and female language learners; specifically, the perception of top-down and bottom-up reading anxiety across gender as well as the perception of classroom reading comprehension across gender. This study uses quantitative design with a survey as the instrument. 30 respondents from social sciences faculty in a public university were randomly chosen for this study. For both top-down and bottom-up anxiety, this study has shown that generally, female respondents reported higher anxiety than male respondents. When it comes to classroom teaching, male respondents reported higher anxiety. Findings in this study has interesting pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of reading comprehension.