Investigating Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Among Indonesian Postgraduate Students in Malaysian University

Postgraduate students are mainly required to comprehend academic writing. This is because they are expected to conduct research based on a specific topic and later publish it in the form of journal articles. As such, it is quite expected of them to constantly read academic materials on a daily basis. Yet, some may struggle at committing themselves to it, especially those whose mother tongue is not English. This study aims to find out the factors, challenges, and solutions of the language reading anxiety faced by Indonesian postgraduate students in Malaysian universities. This qualitative study involved 7 postgraduate students chosen from various departments in Malaysian universities. The data were collected by using a semi-structured interview, where Braun and Clark's thematic analysis was later used to analyze the data. Based on the findings, it was found that there are three factors affecting the students' reading anxiety: vocabulary and grammatical problems, interest in reading topics, and difficulty in understanding texts. It was also found that there are three challenges faced: pronunciation, keeping motivation in reading, and understanding the indirect meaning. These students also suggested some suggestions which are to do reading practices and use Google features regularly. Thus, it can be concluded that Indonesian postgraduate students must practice reading different academic texts more and gain their vocabulary to ease them to understand and comprehend any kind of reading texts, especially in English.