Foreign Language Reading Anxiety: A Turkish Case

Abstract

This paper examines a Turkish graduate student’s academic reading process in English. It first describes the participant’s reading habits both in his native Turkish and in English, then illustrates the difficulties experienced in academic reading in English and the reading strategies applied while reading academic texts in English. Data were gathered from a twenty‐seven year old Turkish student throughout an autumn semester of his graduate study, through interviews, recall protocols, a think‐aloud protocol, and text analysis. The result of this study indicates that the participant experiences difficulty in focusing on, and being able to maintain a satisfactory level of academic reading in English. It is likely that unfamiliar vocabulary or contexts trigger reading anxiety, which disrupts his reading comprehension.