The Impact of Foreign Language Reading Anxiety and Text Feature Awareness on University Students’ Reading Comprehension ESP Texts

Abstract

In the present study, I sought to measure the impact of foreign language reading and text feature awareness on university students ‘reading comprehension ESP texts. This study looked to answer three research questions: 1) Does reading anxiety have any effect on reading comprehension of ESP students?; 2) Dose text feature awareness have any effect on reading comprehension of ESP students?; 3) Is the effect of interaction between reading anxiety and text feature awareness on reading comprehension of ESP students significant?. Participants were 120 students enrolled in ESP classes in four majors including 30 persons in electronic engineering, 30 chemistry engineering, 30 civil engineering and finally 30 persons in management course of Fars Science and Research University. Of all respondents only 93 students answered the questionnaires and gave back them who 46 were male and 47 were female. The students were asked to complete reading comprehension texts from ESP books consisting English for the students of Power, Electronics, Control & Communications and English for the students of Civil Engineering and English for the students of Chemistryand English for the Student of Management, as well as the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) developed by Saito, Garza and Horwitz in 1999 and Text Feature Awareness Questionnaire (TFAQ) developed by Mehrpoor in 2004. The results of the study reveal that there is significant relationship between reading anxiety and reading comprehension, correlation is negative. It means that the reading comprehension is increased with decreasing the FLRAS, but there is a positive significant relationship between reading comprehension and TFA, based on the results of the study it can be inferred that the higher the learners’ awareness of the text features, and the higher their L2 technical proficiency, the better performance on L2 reading comprehension task will be and vice versa. Finally, from the regression analysis, we infer that there was a significant relationship between the reading comprehension and the interaction of FLRAS and TFAQ. Moreover, the analysis revealed that the FLRAS had stronger effect on the reading comprehension than the TFAQ.