Sci.Int.(Lahore),31(2),351-354, 2019 ISSN 1013-5316;CODEN: SINTE 8 351 March-April VALIDATION OF INSTRUMENT IN MEASURING ENGLISH LANGUAGE READING ANXIETY AMONG FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS Kalthom Husain 1 , Puziah Abd Wahab 1 , Aishah Amirah Zainal Abidin 1 , Haniza Othman 1 , Mohd Salihin Hafizi Mohd Fauzi 1 , Aida Nasirah Abdullah 2 1 Faculty of Education, Kolej Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Selangor (KUIS), Bandar Seri Putra, 43000Kajang, Selangor MALAYSIA 2 Faculty of Management and Leadership, Universiti Pertahanan Malaysia, Kem Sungai Besi, 57000 Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA  For correspondence; E-mail: kalthom@kuis.edu.my ABSTRACT: Anxiety is associated as a state of uneasiness and apprehension about uncertainties. This paper describes the validation process of an instrument to measure reading anxiety among English Foreign Language Learners (EFL). This instrument is adopted and adapted from English Language Foreign Language Anxiety Instrument (ELFRAI) developed by Masoudzoughi. However, some of the items in ELFRAI were reconstructed to reduce ambiguity. It is a non-verbal self- reported instrument measure to measure English Language reading anxiety. The instrument is structured into two parts namely demography and causes of reading anxiety and contains eight items and 27 items respectively. To identify reading anxiety among EFL, a total of 366 responses at two states private universities colleges located Selangor and Kedah were analyzed. This study adopts the quantitative approach as its research methodology. It uses SPSS version 22 to analyze the findings gathered. The results of the study depict a reliability Cronbach's Alpha, hence it supports the validity of the instrument Keywords: Validation, Instrument, Reading Anxiety, Foreign Language, ELFRAI 1. INTRODUCTION Foreign language educators are very much concerned with the difficulties faced by learners when learning a foreign language. Past research on engaging affective variables such as attitude, motivation, anxiety, and beliefs about foreign language learning has been impacted foreign language acquisition [1] and [2] suggest that anxiety are underlying sources of learners' fears and anxieties in the study process. In learning a foreign language, reading anxiety is a specific phobia, situational type, toward the act of reading. It has been defined as an unpleasant emotional reaction toward reading that results when the student's intellectual drives of curiosity, aggression, and independence become associated either singularly or in combination with significant other disapproval and the reading process [3]. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW This section encompasses the related previous studies that shall serve as the backdrop of the study. The studies are structured into three main subsections namely language learning and anxiety, variables affecting anxiety and studies on the validation of reading anxiety instrument. Language Learning and Anxiety Language anxiety is a type of anxiety specifically associated with second/foreign language learning contexts. Three components of language anxiety are identified: communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation [4]. People with communication apprehension are shy about communicating with others and have difficulty speaking in public and listening to spoken messages. In language classes, students are required to communicate with each other and sometimes asked to speak in dyads, in groups, or in public. Students with communication apprehension tend to develop language anxiety. Anxiety has been studied by psychologists from many different perspectives and its effects on cognitive, affective and behavioral functioning are well established [5], Language anxiety is explained [6] as a psychological construct, has been an intriguing subject for research for the past 4 decades, and various definitions have been proposed describe Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) has been described [1] as “a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process” Learning anxiety is generally viewed as the manifestation of feelings of incompetence in doing any task. If this kind of feeling is recurrent, then students may routinely expect to have the same difficulty in all situations and accordingly get nervous even if the task is not very challenging. Burden (2004) argued that anxious students have negative self- concepts and they always underestimate their efforts when speaking or conducting any task when they are compared to other students. Anxious learners may develop more anxiety if they feel that their behavior is always scrutinized, judged and compared with other students. This type of tension might be softened by encouraging various activities such as group work and/or pair work where the students' product is viewed as the outcome of collective cooperative work. B. Variables Affecting Anxieties A study [7] examined whether teachers’ attitudes were related to the language anxiety of 67 EFL students. He found that students were less anxious if the teachers’ attitude toward them was more supportive. As for “learners’ gender”, the study too, identified gender as a predictor of language anxiety with female students showing higher anxiety than male students. Another study [8] indicated similar findings with females being more anxious than males. Yet, [9] investigated language anxiety in 252 university students majoring in English and found no significant effect of gender on students’ anxiety. In sum, studies examining the variables of language proficiency levels and teacher’s role yield similar results, which are that students with higher language proficiency tend to have lower language anxiety, and teacher’s supportive attitude helps decrease students’ language anxiety. However, inconsistent results have been found in the studies exploring the variables of the length of language learning and learners’ gender. Hence, further exploration of how language anxiety changes with the two variables is needed.