mid-term test, and final test orally or written, to evaluate whether the students have master the material or not.
The last component of anxiety is fear of negative evaluation. Howirtz defines fear of negative evaluation as the apprehension about
people’s evaluation, avoidance of evaluative situations and the expectation that others would evaluate someone negatively.
21
It sounds similar with test anxiety yet it is in broader scope. This anxiety is not only in test-
taking situation but also may occur in any social situation, such as interviewing for a job. In line with Howirtz and the other, Brown stated
that fear of neg ative evaluation appears from students’ need to make the
other give positive social impression.
22
In foreign language learning context, students may have a fear of negative evaluation from both their
classmates and teacher as the one who fluently master the target language.
2. Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale FLCAS
Since anxiety affects many aspects of foreign language learning, it is important to be able to identify students who are anxious in foreign
language class. Howirtz developed Foreign Language Classroom anxiety Scale FLCAS to measure students’ anxiety. This scale has been widely
used by researchers to measure foreign language learners’ anxiety and
examine the effect of anxiety on learning in different contexts. The items presented at FLCAS reflect the three components mentioned in the
previous explanation: communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation in the foreign language classroom. The FLCAS
consists of 33 statements divided into communication anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety, and anxiety of English classes. The
respondents are asked to rate each item on five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ‘strongly disagree’ to 5 ‘strongly agree’.
21
Elaine K. Horwitz, et. al., Loc.cit.
22
H. Douglas Brown, Op. cit., p. 162.
The FLCAS was administered by Howirtz, in a number of separate studies, to approximately 300 students in introductory undergraduate
foreign language classes at the University of Texas at Austin.
23
The result of the study suggested that foreign language anxiety can be reliably and
validly measured and that it plays an important role in language learning.
24
Hence, FLCAS can be an alternative to measure students’ anxiety because, firstly, it was reliable and valid measure, and secondly, many researchers
have used this kind of anxiety measurement.
C. Reading
1. The Nature of Reading
Reading becomes one of the four basic language skills; listening, speaking and writing. Reading is an activity that can enable people to
increase their knowledge or information without participation of the teacher. In learning English process, reading is the language skill that has
an important function and should be mastered by students because it provides students with several activities to help them in comprehending
the passage and to accustom them become students who can read efficiently.
As defined by Grabe and Stoller, Reading is the competence to describe meaning from the printed text and appropriately interpret the
meaning.
25
Briefly, reading is the ability to transfer the meaning from the written text to the form of information. In addition, Brassel and Timothy
explained that reading is the capability to comprehend or create meaning from written text.
26
In line with previous explanations, Ur pointed reading
23
E. K. Horwitz, Preliminary Evidence for the Reliability and Validity of a Foreign Language Anxiety Scale, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 20, 3, p. 560
24
E. K Horwitz, Op.cit., p. 561.
25
William Grabe and Fredrick L. Stoller, Teaching and Researching Reading, New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 3.
26
Danny Brassel and Timothy Rasinski, Comprehension That Works: Talking Students Beyond Ordinary Understanding to Deep Comprehension, Huntington Beach: Shell Education,
2008, p. 15.
as a process of decoding —translating the written symbols letters or
words into corresponding sounds and understanding what it means.
27
In other word, reading is the way people interpret the group of letters of
words in a text and understand the meaning of those words in the text. It cannot be said reading if people cannot understand what they have read.
From the definitions of the experts above, the writer concludes that reading is not only the ability to interpret the written symbols, such as
letters or words, but also the way of getting meaning and understanding from the words that have been read.
2. The Purpose of Reading
There are several purposes of reading, such as read to learn specific material, read to entertain, read to do assignments, etc. Grabe and Stoller
classify four main heading of reading purposes, they are:
28
a. Reading to search for simple information
It is a common reading ability which is used so often in reading tasks that it is best seen as a type of reading ability. Usually, the
readers read the text for a specific word, a certain information, or representative phrase. For example, students usually search through a
dictionary to find a word and its meaning. In addition, in this purpose the readers usually use a combination of strategies for guessing where
the important information placed in the text. b.
Reading to learn from texts It commonly occurs in academic and professional contexts
where someone needs to learn a number of information from a text. This purpose requires abilities to remember and understand main ideas
and its supporting ideas in the text; recognize and construct rhetorical frames that organize the information in the text; and relate the text to
27
Penny Ur, A Course in Language Teaching Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 138.
28
William Grabe and Fredrick L. Stoller, Op.Cit., pp. 7-8.
readers’ background knowledge. In this case, the readers need more time to understand the text because they need to connect text
information with their background knowledge. c.
Reading to integrate information The readers
’ goal of this purpose is using their critical evaluation of the information being read to decide what information to
integrate and how to integrate it. The tasks of this purpose may be reading to write and reading to critique texts that represent common
academic tasks which need reading abilities to integrate information. d.
Reading for general comprehension Reading for general comprehension becomes the most basic
purpose in reading and more complex than commonly assumed. When a skilled fluent reader accomplish this purpose, the reader needs very
rapid and automatic processing of words, strong skills in forming a general meaning of the main ideas, and time management to organize
many processes. According to the explanation above, it can be conclude that the
main purpose of reading is for increasing knowledge by a variety of ways, such as taking lesson from the texts, searching simple information and so
on.
3. Types of Reading
There are various types of reading. According to Broughton et.al, types of reading are divided into reading aloud, silent reading, intensive
reading and extensive reading.
29
The first type is Reading aloud. This type of reading is concerned on oral matter primarily that is focused on pronunciation than to
comprehension. It cannot be done using unfamiliar text. A familiar text is
29
Geoffrey Broughton, et.al., Teaching English as a Foreign Language, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 92-93.
