An Empirical Study of Testophobia among Adult Vernacular Learners of South Eastern Haryana

Abstract

newline This empirical study hypothesizes that test for an EFL learner in the South-Eastern Haryana becomes an impediment in learning English as a 2nd language. This study aims to explore the possible affective factors to understand the level of the Eastern Haryana Vernacular Adult learner towards English language and secondly why test proves as an impediment in learning and mastering English for the adult learners in the chosen schools of Southern Haryana. Given the stated hypothesis, the study sets five prime objectives to be attained: (i) Exploring the psyche of students towards test. (ii) Assessing whether or not testophobia is an impediment in learning and mastering English language. (iii) Understanding the linguistic and non-linguistic causes of testophobia among English as Second Language (ESL) learners of Haryana (iv) Investigating the influence of testophobia among different demographic variables (v) Exploring a learner centric conceptual framework of testing to overcome testophobia. The respondents of the study were 400 purposively selected second year low-performing students of four senior secondary schools of South Eastern Haryana. As for the method of data collection, five data gathering instruments: questionnaire, unstructured interview, classroom observation, participant observation and document analysis were employed to elicit the required data; whereas descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Test Anxiety Scale (TAS) adapted from Sarason, I.G. (1980), Test Anxiety: Theory, Research, and Application and English Language Classroom Anxiety Scale ELCAS (Horwitz, and Cope, 1986) were the two anxiety scales that were used to measure anxiety in general and English test anxiety in particular. newlineKeywords: Testophobia, Linguistic, Non Linguistic, Pedagogical Perceptive, Anxiety, English as second language, Impediments, Test Anxiety Scale (TAS), English Language Communication Apprehension Scale (ELCAS), Conceptual framework