Exploring Factors and Levels of EFL Vietnamese Learners’ Reading Anxiety: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Reading a second or foreign language is a complex cognitive process influenced by various factors, with anxiety—often considered “reader affect”—playing a significant role in readers’ performance. Although past studies have identified various reading anxiety sources and classifications of reading anxiety levels, evidence from Vietnamese contexts is scarce. Furthermore, no studies have clarified reading anxiety levels. To address these gaps, the current study employed an explanatory sequential design involving 715 students from different majors at a private university to examine the factors contributing to reading anxiety and to assess its levels. The survey data revealed four primary factors causing students’ reading anxiety: reading topics and strategies, linguistic text issues, exams, and hands-on practice. Additionally, most students reported a moderate anxiety level. During semi-structured interviews, participants described a range of emotional responses emerging throughout their reading process and emphasized their anxiety levels using intensifiers as well as adverbs of degree and frequency. Integrating both quantitative and qualitative data, this study proposed a new scaling method for measuring reading anxiety levels and refined the definition and sources of reading anxiety. The study extends the reading-anxiety literature by incorporating evidence from Vietnamese learners and also discusses several pedagogical implications to help mitigate students’ reading anxiety.