Reading at The University: Difficulty vs Fear

Abstract

The act of reading is not a mere interaction between the reader and the text. It also involves the engagement between the reader and what he or she believes in. Readers find reading difficult because they have difficulties with the vocabulary of the target language used in the reading text. Next, some already have language barriers and understanding is hindered by language related issues such as sentence structure and or culture-related phrases. Readers fear reading because of top-down anxiety, bottom-up anxiety or even the classroom reading instructions. This study is done to investigate readers' perception of reading comprehension difficulties and also readers’ fear of reading. Thirty respondents from social sciences faculty in a public university were randomly chosen for this study. The instrument used is a questionnaire. The survey has 3 sections. Section A is about demographic profile; section B is about perceived difficulties in reading comprehension and section C is about reading anxiety. This study has revealed that the difficulties in the reading comprehension were more worrying when it comes to reading. Readers did not blame their lack of vocabulary knowledge for their reading difficulty. They were not very confident when it comes to answering the reading comprehension questions. Learners were anxious when they were given texts they had no background knowledge of. This fear supersedes the other fear for bottom-up reading and classroom reading. Overall findings of the study bear interesting pedagogical implications in the teaching and learning of reading.