Test Anxiety Analysis of Chinese College Students in Computer-Based Spoken English Test.

Introduction With development of technologies and large-scale testing requirement, the need for applying computers in language testing was inevitable in academic contexts (Hosseini, Abidin, & Baghdarnia, 2014). In 1999, Chinese Examinations Board of CET-4 (College English Test-Band 4) and CET-6 (College English Test-Band 6) officially launched Spoken English Test (SET), a typical face-to-face test approach, to examine college students' speaking abilities. However, as the face-to-face spoken English test took much time, effort and expense, which usually resulted in a limited number of test takers, in 2005 the National College English Testing Committee proposed to adopt Computer-based Spoken English Test (CBSET) to measure and assess college students' speaking abilities and communicative skills. Computer-based test featured high-tech and interactive questions that incorporated diverse test stimuli and objectiveness, like video and graphics, and superiorly recorded voice quality (Davis, 2012). However, when a person was confronted with a novel testing situation, anxious emotion would probably arise and influence his or her test performance (Spielberger & Vagg, 1995; Wenemark, Persson, Brage, Svensson & Kristenson, 2011). With the prevalence of developing and using computer-based tests in educational assessment, issue of test anxiety resulted from the new testing approach of employing computers has raised concerns of researchers. Literature review Test achievement was very important and decisive in a person's academic development. In order to achieve high test scores, students are naturally under great pressure. Similarly, results obtained to assessment were usually taken into account when decisions to be made with regard to individuals in different environments, hence assessments have become stimuli that caused anxiety reactions (Zeidner, 1998). When students took a test, their performance would be expected to be influenced by the perceived consequence of the test (Wolf, Smith,B Zeidner & Matthew, 2005). Test anxiety Anxiety referred to feelings of fear, worry, and unease caused by external or internal potential threats (Grupe & Nitschke, 2013). Test anxiety was a situation-specific anxiety experienced in evaluative situations (Putwain, 2008), and generally consisted of two components: cognitive components, such as worry and test-irrelevant thinking, and affective components, such as emotionality and bodily symptoms (Zeidner, 1998). A great number of studies were devoted to exploring antecedents relate to test anxiety. Studies showed that anxiety has been found to be associated not only with negative attitude but also poor academic outcomes in the subject and low confidence regarding the ability to learn (Jansen, Louwerse, Straatemeier, Van der Ven, Klinkenberg, & Van der Mass, 2013). Test anxiety also often stemmed from inadequate test preparation, discomfort with testing situation or inaccurate perceptions regarding test-taking skills, and their perceptions regarding technology use (Beggs, Shields & Janiszewsk, 2011; Tatar, Zengin & Kagizmanli, 2015). Computer-based test Computer-based test (CBT) was generally defined as an integrated procedure in which language performance is elicited and assessed by computers (Noijons, 1994). Being considered as an evolutionary step to future testing mode, CBT has been the research focus of educators and researchers. Some researchers investigated the technical aspects of CBT, ranging from item pool construction (He & Reckase, 2013) to comparison of different item-selection methods (Finkelman, Kim, Weissman & Cook, 2014; He, Diao & Hauser, 2014). Some researches focused on the correlation analysis, such as positive correlation between attitude and performance (Stricker & Attali, 2010), negative correlation between test anxiety and performance (Ortner & Caspers, 2011; Ortner, Weifikopf, & Koch, 2014; Lu, Hu, Gao, & Kinshuk, 2016), or no significant correlation between them (Shen et al. …