English Reading Anxiety, Metacognition, and Self-Regulation: A Mediated Model in Media Discourse Settings

A significant number of second language learners struggle to regulate their reading in digital environments containing complex English media. Limited research has examined how reading anxiety and metacognitive strategies influence self-regulated learning (SRL) in such contexts. This study investigated the relationships among English reading anxiety, metacognitive strategies, and SRL in media-based reading among 320 university learners of English. Participants engaged with authentic online news, blogs, and social media texts, followed by completing validated measures of reading anxiety, metacognitive strategy use, SRL, and media-reading performance. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a three-factor structure of Anxiety, Metacognitive Strategies, and SRL. Reading anxiety weakly predicted both metacognitive strategy use and SRL, while metacognitive strategies strongly predicted SRL. Anxiety also showed an indirect effect on SRL through metacognitive strategies. A multi-group analysis indicated consistent patterns across media types, though social media readers reported higher anxiety and lower SRL. Predictive models and cluster analysis revealed that low-anxiety/high-metacognition profiles corresponded to the highest SRL and performance, whereas high-anxiety/low-metacognition profiles performed the poorest. Overall, findings highlight the mediating role of metacognitive strategies and the need for anxiety-sensitive, SRL-supportive instruction in digital English reading.