IMPACT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE READING ANXIETY FACTORS ON READING PERFORMANCE

Abstract

The impact of reading anxiety on reading performance and the mediating role of reading strategies in the anxiety-performance relationship has not been extensively evaluated, particularly in Vietnamese contexts. This paucity has called for the current quantitative research. A questionnaire survey, including three main scales (reading anxiety, reading strategies, and reading performance), was conducted by 387 English as a foreign language (EFL) students in Information Technology. A Partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) method was applied to data analysis. Results showed that anxiety about linguistic text issues (LTI) impacted both support reading strategies (SUP) and reading performance, while reading topic anxiety affected only reading performance but not SUP. Further, linguistic text issues impacted reading performance through SUP, while SUP did not mediate the relationship between reading topic anxiety and reading performance. Implications and suggestions for future research were also discussed.