The Effect of Test-Wiseness Strategies on the Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Proficiency

Testing and teaching are two inseparable components which can help English as foreign language (EFL) learners take effective steps toward mastering English language. Recently, test-wiseness strategies have arisen as a controversial issue in EFL literature whose effects on learning proficiency have not been seriously explored. So, a quasi-experimental pretest and posttest design was used by the researcher to explore the effects of using test-wiseness strategies (independent variable) on EFL learners’ proficiency (dependent variable). To this end, a sample including 42 intermediate EFL learners from language institutions in Torbat-e- Heydariyeh, Iran was selected based on their performances in Quick Placement Test (as a homogenizing test) among 100 participants. These participants were assigned to experimental (N=21) and control (N=21) groups and given oxford placement test as the pretest. All of them were female and their age ranged from 17 to 19.The treatment lasted for eight sessions. Materials used in this study were eight samples of Iranian university entrance exam, English part .Each sample comprised 25 multiple choice items (grammar ,vocabulary, one cloze test ,and two reading comprehension texts).First, the participants in the experimental group were instructed Sarnaki’s (1979) five-category taxonomy for test-wiseness strategies before accomplishing their task to know how to do the tasks better. Next, each sample was given to the participants in each session. The participants had to answer the sample based on the strategies instructed. Participants in the control group did not receive any test-wiseness strategies, but they received the samples and they were allowed to check their answers and correct them if necessary. Finally, oxford placement test was administered as the posttest to compare means of the two groups in order to show the effects of the treatment applied to the experimental group. The results of T-test indicated the significant outperformance of the experimental group over the other one in the posttest. To elicit participants’ beliefs about using the treatment, a semi-structured interview containing five open –ended questions concerning use of test-wiseness strategies was designed and administered to the experimental group. The majority of the participants indicated their positive beliefs about the employment of these kinds of strategies. One of the participants stated that these strategies helped me not lose my self-confidence and answer the tests better. Moreover I tried to increase my knowledge while answering the test . The present finding provides pedagogical implications for using test-wiseness as effective strategies in EFL settings.

Keywords:

Test-Taking Strategy , Test-Wiseness Strategies , Proficiency , Language Testing , Task