Korean English Learners’ Reading Strategy Use and Reading Performance in Relation to Reading Anxiety

Abstract

The present study examines whether the use of reading strategies acts as a moderating variable in the relationship between foreign language (FL) reading anxiety and reading performance. In particular, it examines whether the moderating effect of reading strategy use varies according to either different levels of FL reading anxiety or to different subscales of reading strategy (i.e., global strategy, problem-solving strategy, and support strategy). The participant pool comprised 245 Korean high school students who were learning English as a foreign language. The instruments used in the data collection were Saito, Horwitz, and Garza’s (1999) Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale and Mokhtari and Sheorey’s (2002) Survey of Reading Strategies. The results showed that middle- and low-anxiety groups scored significantly higher on the use of global strategy than did those in the high-anxiety group. In addition, there were significant differences in English reading performance among the three levels of FL reading anxiety groups. The low-anxiety (with regards to FL reading) group showed the highest reading scores, while the high-anxiety group showed the lowest scores. Furthermore, positively significant relationships were found between English reading performance and each of the two reading strategy subscales (i.e., global strategy and problem-solving strategy) only in the middle-level FL reading anxiety group. The results also showed that both global strategy use and problem-solving strategy use significantly moderate the adverse relationship existing between middle-level FL reading anxiety and English reading performance. Based on the results, limitations and pedagogical implications were discussed.