UNIDIMENSIONALITY OF THE CHINESE VERSION OF THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE READING ANXIETY SCALE

Abstract

Previous research showed the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale is reliable and valid for assessing reading anxiety in groups of American college students beginning study of French, Japanese, or Russian. Because Saito, Horwitz, and Garza (1999) reported that reading anxiety tends to vary with the target language, the present investigation examined the factorial validity of the Chinese version of the scale in college students of English as a foreign language in Taiwan. Confirmatory factor analysis with maximum likelihood method supports the unidimensionality of the scale, which is reliable and valid for eliciting reading anxiety of Chinese college foreign language learners and for predicting their global language performance. This study suggests exploring how language proficiency, culture, and topic familiarity may be related to such anxiety.