on the relationship between actual vs. perceived difficulties of a text and iranian efl learners reading anxiety

abstract this study examines the relationship between reading anxiety and difficulty of texts as well as the relationship between reading anxiety and students perceived difficulty of the texts. since difficulty is a relative concept, i limited its definition by sticking to the readability formula. we also took students perceived difficulty levels into account. therefore, in the present study, with 86 undergraduate students of the university of arak and the university of qom, we were interested investigating the possibility of any relationship between foreign language reading anxiety on the one side, and actual/ perceived difficulty of texts on the other. to achieve our goal, we administered two reading comprehension tests to the participants, after completion of the test, the participants took a foreign language reading anxiety questionnaire too. each text was followed by two additional questions; one regarding students degrees of familiarity with the topics and the other regarding their opinions about text difficulty. a foreign language classroom anxiety questionnaire was used to estimate their general anxiety level. results indicated that foreign language reading anxiety is not related to actual/perceived difficulty of a text; also, it was revealed that the interactive effect of perceived difficulty and language proficiency is related to foreign language reading anxiety. the findings indicate that difficulty level of a text, as far as it is determined by readability formula, might not be an influencing factor in students experience of reading anxiety. moreover, the assumed difficulty level may not play a central role in contributing to the students perceived difficulty of a text. when students perception of a text difficulty is low, there seems to exist no relationship between reading anxiety and perceived difficulty. key words: foreign language reading anxiety, foreign language classroom anxiety, actual difficulty, perceived difficulty.