A CORRELATIONAL STUDY OF EFL READING COMPREHENSION, READING ANXIETY, AND READING MOTIVATION

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the causal relationship among the reading anxiety, reading motivation and EFL reading comprehension in Iranian EFL learners. In other words, it attempted to determine how well this set of variables predicts reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. To do so, a descriptive study was adopted. The data through 2 different questionnaires, EFL Reading Anxiety Instrument (EFLRAI) by Zoghi (2012),and Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ) by Wigfield and Guthrie (2000), and also the learners' Reading Comprehension Scores, collected from among 100 learners who were studying English as a foreign language in ILI Pars Abad Moghan Branch. The obtained data was analyzed by means of a statistical software program (SPSS) through an advanced statistical test named the multiple regression method. The results showed that EFL reading motivation along with EFL reading anxiety can significantly predict the criterion variable of reading comprehension i.e. %38 of variance in reading comprehension scores are due to the predictor variables in this study. Besides, the predictor variable of EFL reading anxiety was found to be the best predictor (53% of the variance) of reading comprehension.

Keywords:

Anxiety , Foreign language reading anxiety , Motivation , Reading motivation , Reading comprehension