Exploring Anxiety in Speaking Exams and How it Affects Students’ Performance
Abstract
This study aims to contribute to the present studies carried on the speaking anxiety of students during oral exams, and examines a group of Turkish students in order to explore their ideas and performances about the computer-based oral exams compared to face-to-face oral exams in terms of causing anxiety. In order to lessen the students’ face-to-face oral exam anxiety it is thought that computer-based oral tests can be helpful to increase speaking performance while mitigating the anxiety level. With this purpose, 28 subjects in the freshman year who enrolled to the English Language Teaching department at Canik Başarı University were measured with a questionnaire consisted of 36 items. ‘Cronbach’s correlation alpha’ was administered to check the validity of the questionnaire, and ‘Frequency and Percentile’ tables were used for the interpretation of the data. The study and the questionnaire results showed that computer-based oral exams did not provide much difference on the oral exam anxiety of students despite the positive attitudes of some subjects towards computer-based exams.