The act of reading is not a mere interaction between the reader and the text. It also involves the engagement between the reader and what he or she believes in. Readers find reading difficult because they have difficulties with the vocabulary of the target language used in the reading text. Next, some already have language barriers and understanding is hindered by language related issues such as sentence structure and or culture-related phrases. Readers fear reading because of top-down anxiety, bottom-up anxiety or even the classroom reading instructions. This study is done to investigate readers' perception of reading comprehension difficulties and also readers’ fear of reading. Thirty respondents from social sciences faculty in a public university were randomly chosen for this study. The instrument used is a questionnaire. The survey has 3 sections. Section A is about demographic profile; section B is about perceived difficulties in reading comprehension and section C is about reading anxiety. This study has revealed that the difficulties in the reading comprehension were more worrying when it comes to reading. Readers did not blame their lack of vocabulary knowledge for their reading difficulty. They were not very confident when it comes to answering the reading comprehension questions. Learners were anxious when they were given texts they had no background knowledge of. This fear supersedes the other fear for bottom-up reading and classroom reading. Overall findings of the study bear interesting pedagogical implications in the teaching and learning of reading.
Jafarigohar, M., & Behrooznia, S. (2012) The Effect of Anxiety on Reading Comprehension among Distance EFL Learners. International Education Studies, Vol 5(2), pp. 159-174. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ies.v5n2p159
Lesaux, N. K., & Kieffer, M. J. (2010). Exploring Sources of Reading Comprehension Difficulties Among Language Minority Learners and Their Classmates in Early. American Educational Research Journal, 47(3), 596–632.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40928348
Rahmat, N. H., Abdul Rahman, S. A., Yunos, M. D. R., Abdul Rahman, S. A., & Abdul Rahman, A. H. (2022) Exploring the Use of Knowledge in Language Learning. International Journal in Academic Research in Business & Social Sciences, Vol 12(2), pp 16-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.6007/IJARBSS/v12-i2/12268
Rahmat, N. H., Arepin, M., and Sulaiman, S. (2020) The Cycle of Academic Reading Fear among Undergraduates. Asian Journal of University Education (AJUE), Vol 16(3), pp 225-274. http://dx.doi.org/10.24191/ajue.v16i3.9730
Rahmat, N. H., and Mohandas, E. S. (2020) Vocabulary Acquisition among ESL Learners: A Look at Strategies and Barriers. European Journal of English Language Teaching, Vol 6(2), pp 26-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejel.v6i2.3431
Rahmat, N. H. (2018) Educational Psychology: A Tool for LanguageResearch. PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences, 4(2), 655-668.
http://dx.doi.org/10.20319/pijss.2018.42.655668
Rahmat, N. H. (2019) Cycle of Fear in Learning: The Case for Three Language Skills. American Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 4(1), pp 151-162.
http://dx.doi.org/10.20448/801.41.151.162
Rahmat, N. H., Abdul Rahman, S. A., and Hassan, H. R. (2018) Exploring Reading Issues among Millennials and GenZ. European Journal of English language Teaching. Vol 4(2), pp 112-125. https://oapub.org/edu/index.php/ejel/article/view/2158
Rika, S. (2018) Case Study on Students’ Difficulties in Comprehending Narrative Text at SMPN 1 Siman Ponorogo in Academic Year 2017/2018. A Thesis, English Education Department, Tarbiyah Faculty, State Institute of Islamic Studies (IAIN) Ponorogo, Advisor. Dra. Aries Fitriani, M.Pd.
http://etheses.iainponorogo.ac.id/4241/1/case%20study.pdf
Somro, A. H., Khan, I., & Younus, M. (2019)Top down, bottom up & classroom reading anxiety and their effect on reading performance of undergraduate engineering students in Pakistan", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/ JARHE-07-2018-0138
Taha, A. H. A. M., and Yousif, A. A. (2018) Problems Encountered by Students in Reading Skill: A Case Study. International Journal of Current Researhc. Vol 12(1) pp 991109917. https://doi.org/10.24941/ijcr.37815.01.2020.
Zhou, J. (2017) Foreign Language Reading Anxiety in a Chinese as a Foreign Language Context. Reading in a Foreign Language. Vol 29(1), pp 155-173.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1137892.pdf.
In-Text Citation: (Noorezam et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Noorezam, M., Rahmat, N. H., Sim, M. S., Noh, M. Z. M., Aripin, N., & Mukhtar, Z. A. (2022). Reading at The University: Difficulty vs Fear. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(8), 263– 276.
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)
Published by Knowledge Words Publications (www.kwpublications.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
