Investigating the Relationship between Test-Taking Anxiety and Test-Takers’ Performance on the IELTS Test

Abstract

Although there is a growing body of research indicating that anxiety relates to foreign language learning, the correlation between anxiety and learners’ performance on a high-stakes testing context has not been fully explored. To date, studies investigating the relationship between test-taking anxiety and test-takers’ performance are not only limited in number, but also partial in nature as most of them only looked at one aspect of test-takers performance, i.e. listening, speaking, or writing performance only. This study is aimed at investigating the relationship between test-taking anxiety and test-takers’ performance with a holistic view, taking into account the test-takers’ performance on the listening, reading, speaking, and writing modules of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS™) test. The participants in this study were 15 government officials taking an IELTS test preparation program. Two instruments were utilized in this study: (1) a set of test-taking anxiety questionnaire items to measure the level of anxiety and, (2) the official IELTS™ test to measure test-takers’ performance. The results indicated that there was a weak to moderate correlation between test-taking anxiety and the test-takers’ performance across different modules of the IELTS test. These results corroborate the findings from previous studies.

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“…The results show an interesting scenario as the relationship between test-taking skills and the scores in the inbuilt activities between various segments of the counseling course varied across the in-built activities. This supports Larson-Hall (2012) argument as reported in Hartono (2019) that it is misleading to consider results of a statistical test not significantly significant only because its effect size is higher than the arbitrarily set 0.05 cutoff point. The results paved the way for other analysis on correlation to be done since the study focused on only counseling perspectives of the students used in the study.…”

“…This means they might not have taken a serious view of using test-taking skills to engage the in-built activities. Such behavior might lead to desensitization due to familiarization of the activities and so made them not use the skills in test-taking (Hartono, 2019;Winke & Lim, 2014) which could be explored further.…”

“…Another important point to note is that even though the study was not on anxiety and listening, as reported in Hartono (2019), anxiety correlates negatively with learners' performance in the classroom even though classroom results are not what high stakes require. Using the in-built activities considered as low stakes testing, studies that investigated testing context are both limited, and the investigation is limited to one particular skill of listening.…”

“…Further, Edwards (1984) asserts that with a small sample, a pair may contribute excessively to the value of the correlation coefficient. Ensuring robustness of the statistical test, bootstrapping technique in calculating descriptive statistics test and correlation coefficient was adopted since LaFlair, Egbert and Plonsky (2015), and Hartono (2019) all maintain that bootstrapping could be implemented to obtain robust statistics when researchers have to deal with issues relating to small sample that is not normally distributed.…”

Comparison of test performance on paper-based testing (PBT) and computer-based testing (CBT) by English-majored undergraduate students in China

“…Additionally, this study also found that different anxiety levels might cause some differences in performance between the two modes. Studies showed that students with a lower comfort level with computers may experience greater test anxiety, resulting in lower scores of CBT (Hartono, 2019). Some other studies also showed that computer anxiety is not reliant on the degree of computer experience (e.g., Rabiu et al, 2020;Zheng & Cheng, 2018).…”