| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語所 === 98 === The purpose of this study was to investigate how different topics and text formats affected the levels of foreign language reading anxiety and self-efficacy among college students in Taiwan. Specifically, the levels of FL reading anxiety elicited by the following five topics were explored: entertainment/leisure, culture, health, business/money, and relationships. Regarding text formats, three dimensions of visual elements and passage organization were examined; they were columns, illustrations, and length. This study aimed to determine how text format affected college students’ beliefs about their ability to comprehend the passages they read.
There were 112 college students participating in this study. The instruments were the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (Saito et al., 1999) and the self-efficacy measures (McCabe et al., 2006). The participants were requested to answer the FLRAS after reading each passage with different topics and the self-efficacy measures after viewing the 8 different text formats manipulated by the 3 variables: columns, illustrations and length.
The results indicated that both reading topics and text formats significantly affected the levels of FL reading anxiety. The participants had a lower level of anxiety when reading the leisure/entertainment and the relationships passages, and had a higher level of anxiety when reading the passages about business/money, health, and culture. Such discrepancies were caused by their (1) ability to comprehend when they read, (2) prior experience in learning to read, (3) use of background knowledge, (4) problems with the reading process, and (5) enjoyment of reading. Concerning the effect of different text formats on the levels of self-efficacy, the participants had a significant high level of confidence when they took a quick look at the passage which was short, with illustrations and columns. In contrast, they felt uneasy and anxious when they took a quick look at the passage which was lengthy, solid and without illustrations. This finding suggested that before they read, they had an immediate judgment about the difficulty of an article simply by viewing its format. The present study proposed several pedagogical implications and suggestions for English reading instruction and book publication.
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