Use of Task-based Instruction in Reducing EFL Learners’
Anxiety in Reading Texts in the University of Fire
INTRODUCTION
The economic development has led to the domination of English language and an
ever increasing number of people using this language in their studies and work. Highly
demands of working environment urge people to have ability to read tons of
documents in English in a shorter period of time. Therefore, reading tests were
introduced in many English tests programmes like IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC to assess
their ability to read well. However, the test takers tend to feel nervous during the
English reading tests and this kind of feeling affects their results. So far, a lot of
research have been conducted to examine the reading process as well as to identify the
problems that English learners might have in reading skill.
Reading plays a significant role in language learning. Anderson (1999) states
reading is an essential skill for students to have a good command of a second or
foreign language. For English learners, greater progress and development will be made
in all academic areas, supposing their reading skills can be advanced. Wedell’s defines
reading as “a psycholinguistic process. Readers start with a set of linguistic symbols
that have been chosen by writers to represent the thoughts that they wish to express.
The reading process ends when the readers have interpreted as much of the writers’
intended meaning as is relevant to them. So the writers put their meaning into
language and the readers reconvert the language into meanings.” (Wedell, 1995) His
definition is one of the most frequently cited and widely accepted among numerous
definitions of reading. Reading is a cognitive activity. The three main elements
involved in reading process are reader, text and interaction between the reader and the
text. Chastain (1988) states that reading process is a cognitive system in which readers
actively operate the printed materials to obtain a good comprehension of the text. In
another word, during reading process the reader should make use of their background
and linguistic knowledge to reconstruct the writer’s intended meaning. In a word, the
writer’s intended meaning is under the printed materials and the reader should read
between the lines to get it.
Other researchers have reported their studies on the relationship between reading
comprehension and learners’ anxiety in reading texts. Due to different purposes of
different researches, anxiety may have different definitions. From psychological point
of view, anxiety is defined as “a state of apprehension, a vague fear that is only
indirectly associated with an object” by Psychologists like Higard, Atkinson. (Scovel,
1978). From the perspective of the behavior science, B.B. Wolman (1989) denotes
anxiety as “a feeling of one’s own weakness and inability to cope with real or
imaginary threats. In recent years, it is widely recognized and accepted by language
researchers that anxiety has close relationship with foreign language learning.
Therefore it is frequently and extensively employed to perform foreign language
research. Spielberger (1983) defines anxiety as “the subjective feeling of tension,
apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the automatic
nervous system”. According to Bernhardt (2005), affective factors like anxiety can
explain some variances in foreign language reading performance. Horwitz, Horwitz
and Cope (1986) defined L2 anxiety as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs,
feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the
uniqueness of the language learning process” (p. 128), and anxiety researchers have
proposed that language learning anxiety is unique and distinct from other types of
anxiety. Saito et al. (1999) explain that foreign language reading anxiety is a kind of
anxiety which readers experience in reading foreign language texts. It is “the feeling of
apprehension and worry when learners have to read in a non-native language” (Rajab,
Zakaria, Abdul Rahman, Hosni, & Hassani, 2012, p. 363). Some scholars (Dialami,
2013; Guimba & Alico, 2015; Jafarigohar & Behrooznia, 2012) found that there was a
significant negative relationship between FLRA and reading comprehension among
EFL learners. Saito et al. even developed a questionnaire called the foreign language
reading anxiety scale (FLRAS) to measure the level of FLRA. This questionnaire was
then used by a number of researchers to measure the level of FLRA of learners when
reading texts. Sellers (2000) carried out a study to examine (a) the effect of language
anxiety on reading comprehension and recall of students, and (b) the effect of language
anxiety on the reading process itself. The 89 participants reported that they are
somewhat anxious about foreign language reading compared with other activities. The
study also showed that the participants with higher levels of anxiety recalled less
passage content than others. Moreover, the results revealed that FLRA negatively
influenced the participants’ reading performance. In the same vein, Huang (2001)
investigated the effects of foreign language anxiety on reading in English. The
participants were 236 Chinese university students enrolled in English classes. Saito et
al.’s (1999) FLRAS was administered to estimate the students’ foreign language
anxiety. The findings of the study revealed that Chinese students experienced FLRA.
The findings indicated that FLRA negatively influenced reading comprehension and
reading cognitive process. The outcome from these mentioned studies help to conclude
that students’ anxiety in terms of reading texts affects the reading comprehension and
test results.
Many studies on reducing learners’ anxiety in reading texts have been conducted
to help improve the reading comprehension of learners. In their research article
“Effects of different text difficulty levels on EFL learners’ foreign language reading
anxiety and reading comprehension,” Sparks, Patton and Luebbers investigated the
extent to which individual differences in anxiety on the FLRAS explained unique
variance in L1 achievement, L1 working and phonological memory, L1 print exposure,
L1 reading attitudes, L1 metacognitive ability, L2 aptitude, and L2 achievement.
Hierarchical regressions were used to determine whether the FLRAS would predict
growth in L2 achievement over 3 years of L2 courses. Previous studies with the
FLCAS cited earlier have found that the instrument explained unique variance in L2
aptitude and in L1 skills in elementary school prior to students beginning L2 courses
and also predicted growth in L1 skills from elementary school to high school. The
present study gathered data using additional measures of L1 reading related skills, i.e.,
working memory, phonological memory, metacognitive knowledge reading attitudes,
and a standardized measure of L2 achievement, and it was designed to determine
whether similar conclusions could be drawn about the FLRAS. In their view, the
outcome of studies investigating the role of language anxiety for L2 learning has
implications for both theory and practice. With regard to practice, Sparks and
Ganschow (1995) have long expressed concern that if L2 educators ignore individual
differences in their students’ language skills and instead view L2 anxiety as a primary
causal factor in L2 learning, then they will have little incentive to seek or develop
methodologies to teach L2s to students with language skill differences. With regard to
theory, confusion about the role of anxiety for L2 learning may affect language
instructors’ beliefs and perceptions about student learning. All instructors observe that
some students perform better than others in their classrooms. The L2 instructor who
has been taught that anxiety plays a causal role in more and less successful L2 learning
may believe that a student who is reluctant to read the L2 is anxious and focus on
using anxiety-reduction strategies in the classroom. However, the instructor may not
know (or believe) that there are individual differences in his or her students’ language
learning skills, so the instructor is unaware that the high-achieving student likely has
higher levels of ability in the skills necessary for proficient L2 reading than the
reluctant L2 reader, who is more likely a low-achieving student. In this scenario, the
instructor's beliefs, guided by theory about the relationship between L2 reading and
anxiety, may direct him or her to use anxiety reduction strategies, but the practice of
reducing anxiety to improve the student's L2 reading level is not supported by
evidence.
In her study on the “Correlation of Foreign Language Anxiety and English
Reading Anxiety”, Huang which shows Chinese students are bothered by reading
anxiety coming from their lack of background knowledge and psychological factors
such as anxiety, fear, bad reading habit and low interest in foreign language and others.
According to the above discussion, her paper gives the four strategies to help the
students overcome reading anxiety, promoting students reading efficiency and we
English teacher also can get teaching implication on this issue. These are to help
students strengthen their faith in English reading, to help students develop their
cross-cultural competence, to encourage cooperative learning, to help students build
self-confidence. To complete these objectives, it is necessary to have the guide of
teacher. First, it is necessary for teachers to take some appropriate measures to
alleviate reading anxiety and enhance the English teaching efficiency. Secondly,
teachers should be able to diagnose learners’ reading anxiety precisely and then help
students to cope with the anxiety-provoking situations. Thirdly, teachers should
make students be aware that foreign language reading anxiety is natural and
common due to the fact that foreign language learning is intrinsic and no one can
experience null anxiety, both they themselves and their peers endure FLRA, and it is
not humiliating to feel anxious in reading. Fourthly, it is necessary for both teachers
and students to pay special attention to such affective factors as anxiety, self-esteem,
and pay attention to cultivating students’ positive attitude toward FLR, encouraging
students to exchange their anxious feelings during reading with their peers through
some reading activities.
The studies reviewed above have provided important insights into the
relationship between reading comprehension and learners’ anxiety in reading texts in
terms of reading performance. Most of these studies focused on the role of teacher in
helping learners deal with their anxiety by using psychological approaches. As the
result, little is known about how some methods such as task-based teaching and
learning could help to solve the problem. In the English teaching field, considerable
attention has been given to approaches and instructions which are thought to increase
the comprehensibility of the input (oral or written text) and possibly to facilitate their
language acquisition. One of these instructions is using of reading texts which involve
one or more purposes, tasks or some operations to process the text. Task-based
instruction is considered as "an alternative method to traditional language teaching
methods because it favors a methodology in which functional communicative language
use is aimed at and strived for " (Brumfit, 1984, Ellis, 2003, Willis, 1996, cited in
Kasap, 2005, p.2). Also, TBI is regarded to be an effective approach that fosters a
learning environment in which learners are free to choose and use the target language
forms which they think are most likely to achieve the aim of accomplishing defined
communicative goals (Ellis, 2003 as cited in Kasap, 2005).
In this study, I attempt to investigate the role of a focused tasks consciousness-raising task in reducing anxiety in reading in order to develop English
language reading comprehension among intermediate EFL learners in the University
of Fire in Vietnam. It also looked at the effect of the tasks on the attitudes of the
learners toward reading comprehension. The study expected the outcomes such as gain
in vocabulary, grammatical and discourse knowledge of students' reading
comprehension, which seemed to achieve more easily through task-based instruction.
To force the learners to exchange information at the time of performing the task in
order to achieve some authentic interaction among the participants, task based
instruction was chosen to improve learners reading skills and enhance learners attitude
towards reading comprehension by using real world activities.
This study once more supported the significance of task-based instruction. It also
signified the importance of focused task-based instruction, since focused tasks aim at
inducing learners to process productively some particular linguistic feature. Moreover,
researchers consistently indicate the direct relationship between success in
comprehension and positive attitudes of learners toward reading a text. In this study, it
was hypothesized that task-based instruction could enhance not only learners'
comprehension but also their attitudes toward reading comprehension skill.