The role of attitudinal, voice, and informational metadiscourse characteristics and level of student anxiety were studied as they affect learning from social studies textbooks for 120 sixth-graders. Analyses of covariance, controlling for reading ability, revealed significant interaction effects involving metadiscourse and anxiety. As expected, high anxious students showed their best performance with first person voice and no attitudinal metadiscourse while low anxious students showed the opposite effect. The importance of studying the joint effects of metadiscourse and anxiety as determinants of textbook reading is discussed.
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