A Study Of English Test Anxiety On Middle School Students

During the test process,students have often been baffled by the phenomenon of test anxiety.Test anxiety can influence students' test performance.Therefore,many researchers have focused their studies on test anxiety.With the researches on test anxiety moving on,lots of studies have drawn much attention to investigate the relationship between levels of test performance and levels of test anxiety.Many studies have shown that test anxiety,in most cases,seem to devastate test performance.At present,researches on test anxiety in China mainly focused on the general test anxiety.A few researchers studied English test anxiety.Moreover,most of the researches chose advanced learners(college or university students) as subjects, and there lacks researches on test anxiety of middle school students.In addition,the researches on the regional discrepancy of English test anxiety and the developmental trend of test anxiety in middle schools are relatively few.Based on the status quo mentioned above,the research attempts to explore the relationship between English test anxiety and English test performance of middle school students.Four questions will be answered in light of the research purposes.Question 1:What kind of school has the highest English test anxiety?Question 2:Which grade has the highest English test anxiety?Question 3:Is there a negative correlation between students' English test anxiety and their English test scores?Question 4:Are there negative correlations between English test anxiety and English test tasks? If yes,what are the different degrees of the correlations?The subjects involved in the research are 362 middle school students from three different middle schools in Beijing,Henan and Shandong Province.Among all the subjects,121 are from a key middle school in Chongwen District of Beijing,137 from a common middle school in rural area of Henan Province and 104 from a common middle school of city level in Shandong Province.In this research,data collection was conducted mainly through English tests scores and two questionnaire surveys. Questionnaire of Professor Zheng Richang's version was used to measure test anxiety. A modified version of Test Anxiety Inventory(Jones-Madsen) was employed to measure students' state anxiety levels.Students' test scores are final-term test scores which.were arranged under the command of each school.After the collection of the questionnaires,it was found that 351 questionnaires were valid.The collected data was inputted into the computer and processed by EXCEL & SPSS(the Statistics Package for Social Sciences).In the survey,four major findings are yielded as follows:1.Students of a common middle school in rural areas have higher English test anxiety than students of a key middle school in big cities do.2.The test anxiety level in Grade 2 is the highest.3.There is a strongly significant negative correlation between students' English test anxiety and their English test scores.4.Anxiety scores correlate inversely with scores in listening comprehension at a strong and significant level,and inversely with scores in writing and reading at a significant level.The findings of this study are applicable to a wide range of research areas including English testing and English teaching pedagogy.Meanwhile,different from former studies in which the subjects were advanced learners,this research has selected middle school students as subjects.Moreover,this research investigated the regional discrepancy of English test anxiety and the developmental trend of test anxiety in middle schools,which is a beneficial complement to former studies,and enriches the researches on the test anxiety in China.Of course,there are still some limitations in this research,for example,the small size of subjects and the limited forms of glosses.In further study,the research will choose a more extensive size of subjects,and investigate the ways to reduce students' English test anxiety.