In the last two decades, investigating the sources of foreign language anxiety in general has increasingly attracted the attention of many researchers in the field of foreign language teaching. However, the sources of anxiety that influence the acquisition of certain specific language skills such as reading in particular have rarely been investigated. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore and understand the underlying problems and factors that contribute to reading anxiety faced by EFL students at Yarmouk University, Jordan. It was a qualitative exploration of the sources of English language reading anxiety for which observation, semi-structured interviews and diaries were collected from six informants with different levels of English language proficiency. The findings of the study revealed that there were two aspects of foreign language reading anxiety: personal factor and text feature. Under the concept of personal factor there were also two main sources of foreign language reading anxiety, which are: afraid of making errors and worry about reading effects. On the other hand, there were three main sources of foreign language reading anxiety under the concept of text feature, which are: unknown vocabulary, unfamiliar topic, and unfamiliar culture. The five main sources of foreign language reading anxiety were arranged according to their occurrences and percentages in the study. Moreover, recommendations were proposed.

This systematic review of literature on foreign language anxiety and its relationship with achievement is additional clarification to the earlier works and reviews concerned with this issue. Firstly, it defines the foreign language anxiety concept where eventually foreign language anxiety is differentiated from other related concepts. Secondly, it reviews the existing studies where the constructs of foreign languages are determined. Finally, it presents the studies that concern foreign language anxiety and achievement in a systematic way where different settings, languages, learners' stages and disciplines were involved.

The last decade has witnessed an increasing research trend on foreign language reading anxiety as a skill related to but distinct from foreign language anxiety. However, sources of foreign language reading anxiety have rarely been investigated. Thus, the current study responds to the study by (Saito, Horwitz, & Garza, 1999) and extends the work of (Al-Shboul, Ahmad, Nordin, & Rahman, 2013b) in this specific area to propose a theoretical framework that represents the sources of foreign language reading anxiety and to measure the extent of those sources in the Jordanian EFL context. A cross-sectional survey of 1500 undergraduate students who were taking Basic English courses was administered. A total of 1006 questionnaires were valid for analysis. However, only 408 questionnaires were randomly chosen according to the criteria of quota sampling techniques. The proposed theoretical framework was tested to measure the prevalence of the sources of foreign language reading anxiety to reveal that there were two aspects of foreign language reading anxiety: personal factors and text features. Under the concept of personal factors, there were two main sources of foreign language reading anxiety; afraid of making errors and worry about reading effects. On the other hand, there were three main sources of foreign language reading anxiety under the concept of text features; unknown vocabulary, unfamiliar topic, and unfamiliar culture. Implications to the study and recommendations for further research were considered.

The purpose of this study was to validate one of the most frequently used tools for assessing anxiety associated with foreign languages. The researcher translated it into Arabic because there was no Arabic literature on such an instrument. To achieve the goal, a committee approach was followed (Brislin, 1980) to ensure the validity of the translation. A sample of 102 students was purposefully selected from International Islamic University Malaysia. The instrument consists of 33 items to measure communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was run to validate the instrument; initially, the PCA produced ten-factor solutions, accounting for 71% of the total variance explained. However, the last nine factors had only two or three loadings each, and they had cross-loading as well. Therefore, only one factor was used in the final, which accounted for 51% of the total variance. The researcher took this factor due to its importance for the Arabic literature, which is also in need of a valid instrument to measure communication apprehension. Due to the lack of convergent validity in the other items, the researcher suggests validating the original instrument.