Decisional Control In Reducing Test Anxiety

With the development of humanism and cognitive science, more people turn attention to the learners in Second Language Learning and Teaching. They attach more significance to the learner's emotional needs in addition to their intellectual needs. However, test anxiety, as a negative psychological stress, jeopardizes the testee's performance. Therefore, the educator should try to reduce its effects to the minimum. This paper is developed in the perspective of a test designer. It tries to offer tangible evidence to prove that decisional control can serve to reduce the test anxiety. In the light of cognitive-attentional theory and cue utilization theory, an experiment was designed and carried out in a reading test and writing test. The results confirmed the hypothesis of the author that decisional control in testing can reduce test anxiety and improve test performance.