Korean high school students’ anxiety and affective strategies when taking English listening and reading tests

Abstract

This study examined Korean high school students’ anxiety and affective strategy use when they were taking English listening and reading tests. For the purpose of the study, existing questionnaires from Kim (2002), Saito et al. (1999), and Oxford (1990) were adapted so that the items could measure students’ listening and reading test anxiety and affective strategies concerning test-taking situations. For data collection, 123 high school students were asked to complete the questionnaires, after solving four listening and four reading test items sampled from previous Korean SATs and mock exams. The study found that the students experienced high levels of anxiety when they could not comprehend the first sentence in listening, and when they had to solve many reading items for a short period of time. It is notable that regardless of skill areas, options presented in English were most anxiety-provoking from learner perspectives. The students’ listening test anxiety and reading test anxiety differed according to learner proficiency, with low proficiency learners experiencing higher levels of anxiety. In terms of strategy use, the students were not so active in employing affective strategies, and in a comparison of high- and low-level students, the high-level students were found to use affective strategies more frequently than their counterparts. The findings of the study have meaningful implications for classroom teachers and test developers. © 2022 KASELL All rights reserved.