A Study of the Influence of Top-Down Reading on Reading Anxiety

This study investigates the influence of top-down reading processes on foreign language reading anxiety among Malaysian undergraduate students learning French as a second language. This research evaluates a multidimensional construct encompassing top-down, bottom-up, and classroom-related reading anxiety. Opting for a quantitative survey approach, data were collected from 145 university students using an adapted 27-item Likert-scale questionnaire. The findings underline the primary sources of learner anxiety across all three measured dimensions. In the Top-Down Reading Anxiety dimension, students experienced high distress when they lacked prior background knowledge about the text content (M = 3.59, SD = 0.93) and when they struggled to identify the main idea of a paragraph (M = 3.77, SD = 0.89). In the Bottom-Up Reading Anxiety dimension, linguistic barriers were prominent; students felt most anxious when facing numerous words with unclear meanings (M = 3.72, SD = 0.97) and when dealing with long, complex sentence structures (M = 3.70, SD = 0.97). Conversely, Classroom Reading Anxiety recorded lower, more uncertain scores, peaking slightly when students were asked direct reading comprehension questions by the instructor (M = 3.07, SD = 1.20) and portraying its lowest for pronunciation corrections (M = 2.40, SD = 1.18). Finally, comparative analysis showed that reading anxiety remains a uniform baseline challenge across academic streams, revealing no prominent differences between students majoring in Science & Technology (53% of the sample) and those in Social Sciences & Humanities (45% of the sample). Overall, the results highlight the need for pedagogical strategies that attain a balance between cognitive demands and affective support in foreign language reading contexts by pointing to the combined impact of limited background knowledge, global comprehension demands, and linguistic processing challenges on learners' reading anxiety.

Reading Anxiety, Top-Down Reading, Bottom-Up Reading, Cognitive Theory, Foreign Language Reading.

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