Exploring Causes of Test Anxiety and Difficulties in Reading Comprehension of High School Students

The purpose of the present study was to acquire better understanding of how students felt about taking English Reading Comprehension tests. And then, this study hopes to shed light on how test anxiety and difficulties affected Grade X students' English reading achievement. The sample consisted of 577 students (274 males and 303 females) from six selected schools in Yangon and Ayeyarwaddy region. In this research, descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to find out the significant difference. And then, data were analyzed by means of Pearson's product moment correlations. As the result of the study, it could be concluded that Test Anxiety (TA), Reading Anxiety (RA) were negatively related with students' ERA except using reading strategies (RS). Besides, there were mean differences in ERA among the three groups of students' TA, RA, RS. And then, based on the low groups (138) participants of ERA, the causes of higher test anxiety were explored by listing the frequencies and percentages of students selecting each alternative. According to the result of multiple regression analysis, RA and RS were significantly predicted with ERA but TA did not enter the regression model despite its correlation with ERA