This study used a quantitative method to investigate Taiwanese junior high and senior high school English learners’ reading strategy use, reading anxiety, and the relationship between these two variables. In the following section, detailed descriptions of the participants, instruments, data collection procedures, and data analysis procedures are provided.
Participants
A total of 61 second-graders in one public junior high school and 78 second-graders in one public senior high school in Changhua County participated in the pilot study. For the formal study, 251 second-graders in the same public junior high school and 235 second-graders in the same public senior high school as the pilot study were recruited as the participants because they were assumed to have enough learning experiences to represent students at each educational level. They were also expected to be more willing to answer the questionnaires than the third graders.
Instruments
The instruments employed in this research included Hsu’s (2009) English Reading Strategy Questionnaire and an adapted version of Mills, Pajares, and Herron’s (2006) English Reading Anxiety Scale.
English Reading Strategy Questionnaire
In order to investigate participants’ use of English reading strategies, the researcher used Hsu’s (2009) English Reading Strategy Questionnaire. The English Reading Strategy Questionnaire consists of two categories: general strategies and non-general strategies. General strategies basically correspond to the general reading strategies in Block’s (1986) framework, involving higher-level processing. General
strategies consist of 13 items (items 4, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29), such as “I have a purpose in mind when I read,” “I read aloud to help me understand when texts become difficult,” and “I try to get back on track when I lose concentration.” Non-general strategies consist of items from both the general and local strategies in Block’s (1986) framework, involving both conventional higher-level and lower-level processing. Hsu argued that higher-level processing can be applied in a bottom-up manner in L2 reading because of insufficient language proficiency.
Non-general strategies are composed of 16 items (items 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 21, 22, 24, 27), such as “I analyze every word to construct the meaning of a sentence,” “I write down key words to help increase my understanding,” and “I go back and forth in the text to find relationships among ideas.” In total, English Reading Strategy Questionnaire contains 29 items. The questionnaire applied a 5-point Likert scale continuum from 1 (zero percent of usage) to 5 (almost one hundred percent of usage).
The English Reading Strategy Questionnaire was expanded from the MARSI (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2000) by adding 13 new items and modifying six items in MARSI. The 43-item preliminary ERSQ was pretested by 220 college students.
Exploratory factor analysis, the scree test, the eigenvalue-greater-than-one criterion, and the conceptual interpretability suggested the adequacy of extracting two factors and identified items that might need to be deleted. Again, the ERSQ was factor analyzed using the two-factor solution and a Direct Oblimin rotation. The resultant 29-item ERSQ was then factor-analyzed. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using the Principal Component method of extraction and a two-factor extraction with Direct Oblimin rotation both supported the two-factor solution. Factor I was basically in compliance with Block’s (1986) general strategies while Factor II consisted of both general and local strategy categories in Block’s framework. Besides, the Cronbach’s
alpha coefficients were .96 for the overall scale, and .92 for the General as well as .94 for the Non-General, indicating good internal consistency.
In Hsu’s formal study of 432 college freshmen, the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to examine the factor structures. With NFI, NNFI, and CFI being .96, .97, and .97, the CFA results lent support to its two-factor structure validity.
The reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) for the overall questionnaire was .95, and that of the General and Non-General Reading Strategy subscales was .90 and .92 respectively. The results indicated good internal consistency of the English Reading Strategy Questionnaire.
The English Reading Strategy Questionnaire was then put into the pilot test of this current study. From the results of junior high school participants, the reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha) were .94 for the overall questionnaire, .83 for the General Reading Strategy subscale, and .92 for the Non-General Reading Strategy subscale. The reliability coefficients obtained from senior high school participants were .92, .88 and .88 for the overall questionnaire and the General and Non-General Reading Strategy subscales respectively. These coefficients indicated a high internal reliability. Likewise, in the formal study, the reliability coefficients obtained from junior high school participants were .93 for the overall questionnaire, .89 for the General Reading Strategy subscale, and .89 for the Non-General Reading Strategy subscale. For senior high school participants, the reliability coefficients were .93, .87 and .90 for the overall questionnaire and the General and Non-General Reading Strategy subscales respectively. Therefore, a high internal reliability was also found through the formal study.
The English Reading Anxiety Scale
Mills, Pajares, and Herron’s (2006) French Reading Anxiety Scale was modified and translated into Chinese to form an English Reading Anxiety Scale. Two commonly
used reading anxiety scales, Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) (Saito et al., 1999) and Reading Anxiety Scale (RAS) (Sellers, 2000) were not used because they have been criticized as containing items related to word decoding and reading comprehension skills (Sparks, Ganschow, & Javorsky, 2000).
Mills et al.’s (2006) French Reading Anxiety Scale adapted Betz’s (1978) Mathematics Anxiety Scale (MAS). MAS has been adapted in various academic fields and the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranged from .87 to .91(Pajares & Graham, 1999;
Pajares & Kranzler, 1995; Pajares & Urdan, 1996). Also, Dew, Galassi, and Galassi (1983) reported a test-retest reliability of .87. The French Reading Anxiety Scale measures students’ reading anxiety levels with an 8-point Likert-type scale format in which 0 corresponds to definitely false while 7 represents definitely true. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was .87, indicating a high reliability.
The following are examples of the items in the English Reading Anxiety Scale (ERAS): “Reading in English makes me feel uneasy and confused,” “I get a sinking feeling when I think of trying to read a difficult English reading comprehension passage,” and “I am afraid of doing an English reading comprehension exercises when I know that they will be graded.” The English Reading Anxiety Scale comprises nine items. One junior high English teacher and one senior high English teacher were invited to check the accuracy and comprehensibility of the translated Chinese questionnaire. The English Reading Anxiety Scale was modified based on their suggestions.
The English Reading Anxiety Scale was pilot-tested in this present study and the reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) was .86, indicating a high internal reliability.
In the formal study, the reliability coefficient was .89, also demonstrating a high internal reliability.
Data Collection Procedures Pilot Study
A pilot study was carried out to examine the practicability of data collection procedure and to analyze the reliabilities of the questionnaires. Sixty-one second-graders in two classes at one junior high school and Seventy-eight second-graders at one senior high school in Changhua County were recruited to participate in the pilot study. A 48-item questionnaire which contains the background questionnaire (10 items), the English Reading Strategy Questionnaire (29 items), and the English Reading Anxiety Scale (9 items) was administered to the participants. The researchers asked the homeroom teachers or English teachers to conduct the survey.
According to the problems found, some improvement on the questionnaires was made.
To measure the internal-consistency reliability of the reading strategy use scale and the reading anxiety scale, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for each subscale were calculated. In order to improve the internal-consistency reliability of the subscale, Pearson product-moment correlation was performed between each item and the total of each subscale. Meanwhile, the participants’ feedbacks to this questionnaire were also adopted by the researcher. Based on the correlation coefficient of each item and the total of the subscale to which it belongs to as well as the participants’ responses, some of the items were to be deleted, rephrased or added. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients showed that the internal consistency of each scale was high, with the coefficients of the English Reading Strategy Questionnaire being .83 to .94 and that of the English reading Anxiety Scale being .86. Therefore, no item was deleted. However, some participants expressed that the wording of item 6 of the English Reading Anxiety Scale was ambiguous, hence rephrased.
Formal Study
The formal study took place in the same junior high school and the same senior
high school as the pilot study in Changhua County but with different groups of students. The researcher first contacted the English teachers or homeroom teachers of the second grade at the schools. Being approved by the teachers, the researcher sent the questionnaires to the teachers. The purpose of this study and administration procedures were then explained to the teachers. The teachers were also asked to collect the questionnaires and return to the researcher after the survey. Before filling out the questionnaires, the participants were given the following instructions: First, they could fill out the questionnaire honestly because their responses would be kept confidential and their answers would not be regarded as correct or incorrect. Second, they should answer the questions without thinking too much. All of the questionnaires were collected by the researcher and were typed into the computer for statistical analyses.
Data Analysis Procedures
Data collected from the questionnaires were entered statistical analyses.
Descriptive statistics for each variable were firstly analyzed. In order to answer the first research question, junior high school students’ responses to the English Reading Anxiety Scale (ERAS) were compared with senior high school students’ using independent t-test. Likewise, to answer the second question, junior and senior high school students’ responses collected from the English Reading Strategy Questionnaire were compared by means of independent t-test. Then, in order to explore the relationship between reading anxiety and reading strategy use, Pearson product-moment correlation was conducted respectively for junior high and senior high school students. Lastly, two-way ANOVA was used to examine the interaction effect of anxiety and educational level on strategy use. To do this, the participants were classified into high- and low- anxiety students. The dependent variables were the
participants’ reported uses of general, non-general, and overall reading strategies.
Chapter Four Results
This chapter presents the statistical results of the data analysis computed by SPSS version 19.0. Section one reports results on participants’ background questionnaire.
Sections two to five report results related to each research question respectively.
Specifically, section two shows the results of English reading strategy use among the participants. Section three presents the results of English reading anxiety among the participants. Section four demonstrates the relationship between reading strategy use and reading anxiety. Section five deals with the results regarding the interaction effect of English reading anxiety and educational level on English reading strategy use.
Analyses of the Background Questionnaire Demographic Information of the Participants
A total of 486 students, 251 junior high school students and 235 senior high school students participated in this study. Table 1 shows the numbers and percentages of the participants of both sexes across these two educational levels. For both educational levels, there were almost as many males as females, with females being slightly more than males (junior: male = 47.8 %, female = 52.2 %; senior: male = 48.9
%, female= 51.1%).
Table 2 reveals that almost all the participants started to learn English before Grade 3 or 4. In other words, only few participants started at Grade 5 or 6 (junior = 3.2
%; senior = 8.9 %). As the senior high school participants are three years older than the junior high counterparts, it can be assumed that generally speaking, senior high school participants learned English three years more than junior high school participants.
Table 2
Distribution of participants’ English learning starting points
Educational Level Starting Point N % go to English cram school, with senior high school students being nearly ten percent higher than junior high school students in this aspect (junior = 74.5 %; senior = 82.6
%). Besides, senior high school students reported going to the cram school for 3.59 years as average while junior high school students reported 3.05 years.
Table 3
Distribution of participants’ cram school attendance
Educational Level Cram School Attendance N %
In general, as shown in Table 4, few high school students had been taught by English tutors after school (junior = 2.0 %; senior = 5.5 %). To be more specific, the average years of tutoring reported in the open-ended question were 3.8 and 2.1 for junior and senior high school students respectively.
Table 4
Distribution of the participants’ tutorial status
Educational Level Tutorial N % school students engaged in extracurricular English learning than junior high school students (junior = 29.1 %; senior = 54.0 %). Participants were also asked to report their extracurricular English learning activities and the results show that these activities were quite similar for both educational levels. That is, English learning magazines and books, English learning TV and radio programs, English movies and
English songs were their main extracurricular learning materials. However, senior high school students largely outnumbered junior high school students in their English learning magazine reading (junior = 12.75 %; senior = 42.98 %). Other extracurricular learning sources mentioned were the Internet, on-line games and English camps.
Table 5
Distribution of the participants’ extracurricular English learning status Educational Level Extracurricular N %
Distribution of the participants’ experience of English reading difficulty Educational Level Reading Difficulty N %
On the other hand, Table 7 reflects that English reading pressure has been experienced by more than half of the students from each educational level, with senior high school students feeling slightly higher (junior = 55.0 %; senior = 59.1 %).
Table 7
Distribution of the participants experiencing reading pressure
Educational level Reading Pressure N %
Participants’ Responses to the Open-ended Questions
After reporting whether they experienced English reading difficulty or reading pressure, participants were also inquired to report the sources of their English reading difficulty and English reading pressure through free responses. As for the sources of English reading difficulty, the results reveals that more junior high school students than senior high school students identified grammar (junior = 46.6 %; senior = 29.4
%), text length (junior = 33.5 %; senior = 25.1 %), and topic (junior = 18.3 %; senior
= 9.4 %) as the sources. On the other hand, more senior high school students than junior high school students identified vocabulary (junior = 23.5 %; senior = 72.3 %) as the source. Moreover, slightly more senior high school students reported phrases (junior = 31.9 %; senior = 34.9 %) and other sources (junior = 3.6 %; senior = 4.3 %) as the sources of reading difficulty. Other sources of reading difficulties reported include low English proficiency, antagonistic feeling against English, feeling troublesome to read in English, fear of misunderstanding the texts, the subjectiveness of some reading contents, and lack of pictures to help clarify the meaning.
As regard the sources of pressure in English reading, the results show that junior high and senior high school students were quite similar in their sources of pressure.
Slightly more junior high school students experienced pressure from teachers (junior =
9.6 %; senior = 7.2 %), testing situations (junior = 23.1 %; senior = 18.3 %), and difficult texts (junior = 40.6 %; senior = 40.4 %). Slightly more senior high school participants felt pressure from parents (junior = 8.0 %; senior = 12.3 %), peers (junior
= 7.6 %; senior = 10.2 %), and other sources (junior = 3.2 %; senior = 7.7 %). Other pressure sources reported were quite different between these two groups of students.
For junior high school participants, other pressure sources were related to fear of being teased, their siblings, BC Test, article length, self-expectations, low English competence, and memorization of lexical items. Besides, their pressure sources were quite different among individuals. For senior high school participants, other pressure sources were mainly related to tests, school work and self-expectations. Antagonistic feeling against English and memorization of lexical items were also mentioned.
In addition, two open-ended questions were also listed in the background questionnaire: (1) When you feel an English article is difficult, what will you do to help yourself understand the English article? (2) When you read in English, what will you do to help yourself ease English reading anxiety? The responses collected are as follows.
For the methods to help understand difficult English articles, junior high school students mostly reported consulting other people and looking up words in dictionaries.
Many of them also reported making inferences from the context, engaging in English reading more often, and boosting their English proficiency. Other methods mentioned were reading repeatedly, reading slowly, referring to pictures and simplifying the articles. As for senior high school students, more than half of them reported looking up English words in dictionaries. Besides, many of them reported consulting other people, memorizing more English words, reading repeatedly and engaging in English reading more often. Some reading strategies included in the English Reading Strategy Questionnaire in this study were also mentioned by senior high school students as the
ways to solve English reading difficulties.
For the methods to help ease English reading anxiety, junior high school students reported listening to music, taking a rest, doing other things first and taking it easy as the most frequently used methods. Moreover, engaging in English reading more often, consulting other people, thinking about something fun, taking a deep breath and reading slowly were also reported by many junior high school participants as their ways to ease English reading anxiety. Similar to junior high school students, senior high school students reported taking a rest, listening to music, doing other things first, taking it easy and taking a deep breath as the five most used methods. Other methods are also similar to those reported by junior high school participants. However, senior high school students differ from their junior high school counterparts in that they applied a lot more English reading strategies as the ways to ease English reading anxiety, such as taking notes, underlining, skimming for the main idea, etc. In addition, they had more special habits which they think can help ease reading anxiety, like eating, grabbing hair, pressing fingers, knocking on the desk, and so on.
Reading Strategy Use of Junior and Senior High School Students
This section presents analyses of the English Reading Strategy Questionnaire used in the formal study to collect data. As described in the previous chapter, the English Reading Strategy Questionnaire consisted of two subscales, the General Reading Strategies and the Non-general Reading Strategies. The final make-up of the two subscales comprised 13 items on the General Reading Strategies and 16 on the Non-general Reading Strategies. The participants’ responses to this instrument were put into various statistical analyses. The results are presented as follows.
Descriptive Statistics
Table 8 shows the group mean of each individual English reading strategy and highlights the most frequently used and least frequently used strategies across the two
educational levels. Given the small number of strategy items, three most frequently used and three least frequently used strategies are marked for each of the two strategy subcategories: general and non-general reading strategies. On the other hand, when all of the strategies are taken together (i.e., overall strategy use), the strategies ranked as the top five and the bottom five in mean score are highlighted.
Table 8
Reported use frequency of individual strategies
Junior High Senior High G Non-G Overall G Non-G Overall Mean Mean Mean Mean Mean Mean
(Rank) (Rank) (Rank) (Rank) (Rank) (Rank) 04. I question the importance or
veracity of the information in the article.
15. I think about whether the content fits my purpose or expectation.
17. I skim the text first by noting characteristics like length and organization.
18. I try to get back on track when I lose concentration.
19. I predict what the text is about when reading.
20. I decide what to read closely and what to ignore.
Table 8 (continued)
23. I stop from time to time to think
23. I stop from time to time to think