Investigating EFL Students’ Psychological Anxiety in Reading Performance

Reading is one of English skills that emphasizes on how students pronouncing the word well and how they comprehend the text. Although, most of people think that reading is the easiest skill learned than other skills but in fact reading has its own difficulties part as other skills. The parts are comprehension process and the relationship between reader's ability and interpretation of the text. It will be hard to achieve those parts while students get an anxiety in reading process. Sometime, they are reluctant to read each words, just they will do by soundless. Moreover, they also will start to read if a teacher commands them to read and otherwise. Hence, reading sometime brings learner not confident as psychological problem, due to it needs the ability of good pronunciation and interpretation which not many people can easily do it. By knowing the problem above, this study aims to know what are the factors of anxiety emerged in reading practice and what strategy that can reduce the impact of anxiety. Therefore, to reach the answer researcher uses Library design as a research method. By finding relevant literatures and analyze inductively until deductively, the researcher can accomplish this problem in ELT for reading comprehension as the main point discussion. The finding found that the factors of reading anxiety are unfamiliar vocabulary, unfamiliar topic, personal factor and long text structure, and gender. Meanwhile, the strategies to cope those factor are; increasing teacher performance and competence, using teaching method, using local culture as theme or material topic. After all, it can be concluded that anxiety actually can emerge in reading skill and it is proved by some factors appearance. In addition, for English teacher should be more realize the need of students before determining the class activity especially reading practice.