The Effects of Test Anxiety on Learners’ Reading Test Performance

Abstract

Most students experience some levels of anxiety during an exam. When anxiety affects test performance, it becomes a problem. Test anxiety can interfere with the students’ ability to perform adequately and prevent students from demonstrating their knowledge on examinations. Some students have the skills and knowledge to do very well in testing situations, but their excessive anxiety impairs their performance. Among many factors, anxiety can explain the differences in reading comprehension performance among learners and has a tremendous effect on foreign language reading. The study presented in this paper aimed to explore the effects of test anxiety on Iranian EFL learners’ reading test performance. A total of 34 intermediate male learners at Iran Language Institute (ILI) of Urmia attended the study. Participants took two reading comprehension tests and also completed two questionnaires of Test Anxiety Scale (TAS) and Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) designed to measure their test anxiety and level of foreign language reading anxiety, respectively. The study employed Cronbach's alpha to determine the reliability of TAS and FLRAS and descriptive statistics to provide simple and meaningful interpretations of the data. The study also used One-Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test to investigate the normality of variables’ distribution. Results based on Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient indicated that at the intermediate level of proficiency, learners did not feel anxious during reading test performance and no correlation existed between test anxiety and performance on reading comprehension tests.