Luận văn thạc sĩ VNU ULIS a study of the anxiety of the 12th graders before the english test in the national upper secondary graduation examination at huynh thuc khang high school

Rationale for the research

Nowadays, the significance of tests and academic achievements tends to be drawn much more attention by society Hence, it puts pressure on students to

“succeed,” which leads students to have high anxiety and stress and then affects the individuals ‟ results It is urgent that anxiety and the immediate need for treatment draw more and more attention of educators, not only for today but also for the future Anxiety is becoming one of the most common and wide-spreading mental illnesses The need for treatment should be drawn more attention and the school has become a wonderful place to treat anxiety (Masia -Warner et al., 2005)

In Vietnam, nowadays test is becoming a growing issue to the society especially to the students and parents respectively, simply because there have been so many changes in the examination regulation in recent years in a short time

At Huynh Thuc Khang high school, where I have been teaching English for a long time, in some classes, students expressed negative attitude towards the change in English Test format in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination

From my personal observation and professional experience, I realized that students were unable to work out all of the answers to the questions in the samples of tests they had to do in class and at home Therefore, they seemed to be tired when doing the samples of the English Tests In addition, students were confused about selecting the best ways to prepare for the actual examination Moreover, I was aware that students spent a great deal of time discovering exercises from a variety of sources but they seemed to fail, because they did not have enough abilities to find out what materials were suitable for their revisions As an English teacher, the researcher feels anxious about finding the proper teaching method to help the students to have a better orientation of examination Such a situation has inspired the author to carry out “A study of the anxiety of the 12 th graders before the English

Test in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination at Huynh Thuc Khang high school.”

Aims and Objectives of the study

The aim of the study is to do research on causes of anxiety and some possible solutions to the 12 th graders before the English Test in the National Upper- Secondary Graduation Examination The objectives of the study were:

1 To find out the main causes of anxiety among the 12 th graders before the English Test in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination

2 To suggest some solutions to anxiety

Research questions

In dealing with the aims above, the thesis should focus on finding out the answers to the following questions:

1 What are the main causes of anxiety among the 12 th graders before the English Test in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination?

2 What are some possible solutions to anxiety?

Scope of the study

The researcher focused on the subjects ‟ anxiety of the English Test in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination with its causes of anxiety and solutions before the examination Moreover, due to the pressure of the time, this study carried out at the mid-term of school year 2016-2017 only involves a small number of the 12 th graders (two classes with 84 students) at Huynh Thuc Khang high school.

Methods of the study

The data serving the research analysis collected by employing both quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative methods (interviews) provided the study with information and evidence.

Organization of the study

The thesis consists of three main parts

Part A is the INTRODUCTION, which consists of rationale, aims, and objectives of the study and research questions It also covers scope, methods, and organization of the study

Part B is the DEVELOPMENT separated into three chapters:

+ The first chapter provides the basic theoretical background related to anxiety, test anxiety, and kinds of anxiety Especially, this chapter mentioned possible causes of anxiety and solutions, which are the main issues of the study and the previous studies in brief

+ The second chapter is concerned with methodology used in the study In the first place, author restates the research questions and emphasizes the context, settings, participants, instruments, data collection, and analysis procedure in the process of conducting the study

+ The third chapter shows the main content with findings as well as discussions based on the results from questionnaires and interviews

Part C is the CONCLUSION offering a summary of the mentioned issues, the implication for the study and the limitations and suggestions for further study

LITERATURE REVIEW

Theoretical background

1.1.1 Definitions: Anxiety and Test anxiety 1.1.1.1 Definitions of anxiety

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Freud (1920) thought anxiety was akin to “fear” or fright.” Scovel (1978: 134) suggests that anxiety relates to feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension, or worry Horwitz, et al (1986), define anxiety as “the subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system”

Test anxiety is a strong emotional response in which an individual experiences before and during an examination (Akca, 2011) Usually, situations in which personal evaluations is allowed by individuals are defined as situational evaluation, will possibly cause high levels of performance

1.2.2 Kinds of anxiety 1.2.2.1 Trait Anxiety

Brown (1994) shared opinions that Trait anxiety occurred when there was a likelihood of an individual becoming anxious in any situation

Jonassen and Grabowski (1993) reported that the trait anxiety perspective was productive in reporting effects of generalized anxiety and it has been applicable across situations

Spielberger (1983),Chen and WU (2004) regarded state anxiety as unsatisfactory temporary emotional state or condition, activated by the individuals‟ nervous system such as the experiences in apprehension before taking a test

Jonassen and Grabowski (1993) revealed that it depends on an event or combination of events experienced at the time It shows a transient emotional mood or condition According to them, state anxiety determined by the interaction of trait anxiety may cause individual to perceive situational threat perceive, and so is responsive to situational factors An individual who generally responds to any number of situations with low anxiety may react to high anxiety if there are multiple anxiety-causing conditions present

MacDonald (2010) found out that there were a variety of factors affecting test anxiety among which there were bad attitude of teachers to the applications in doing test, responses of the students towards learning, the inabilities of the test among students, being under fear of negative evaluation, having experience in examination terribly, being under pressure of time Besides, the fact that content was complicated and parental expectations to children ‟ s taking exams were clearly shown as some of factors leading to anxiety

Hills & Benlow, (2008) indicated that there was a correlation between learning method and anxiety, because it can make a person study and pass examinations much more easily Insufficient and inefficient studying can contribute to increasing the test anxiety experienced by a student (Cassady, 2010) Peleg, (2009) stated that students ‟ poor performance on test may firstly due to insufficient studying and preparations; learning was under the dependence on others Besides, family expectations or badly designed tests may make students experience pressure, loss of concentration and inattention, difficulties in memory during the following tests

In other words, Hills & Benlow, (2008) and Cassady, (2010) Peleg, (2009) showed that a suitable studying skill is considered as a better quality of test performance It means that the more students prepare knowledge with an appropriate method, the better their test results are By contrast, from the point of MacDonald ‟ s view, a set of causes of test anxiety were found out like bad attitude of teachers to the applications in doing test, students‟ attitude towards learning, fear of negative evaluation, bad examination experiences, time limitation, difficult course content and parental expectations when conducting his research

Gettinger and Seibert (2002) believed that there was a close relationship between academic competence, the knowledge, and application of effective study skills According to them, students having good study skills are more likely to achieve academic competence They make out task demands, and are able to perform flexible, effective strategies to succeed academically Thus, both of the researchers hold the idea of effective study skills introduced to improve academic performance, strategic knowledge, and affective responses among students with learning problems across multiple academic domains (Harvey & Goudvis, 2000)

According to them, studying habit is one of the causes of test anxiety In other words, if students know how to apply their knowledge to the test together with an effective studying habit, the better results they can obtain In addition to the studying habit, some other researchers identified another cause such as locus of control described as the cause of success or failure (Barzegar, 2011) In the same vein, Bostic (2010) found out that there is a significant difference in academic achievement of students According to him, students that have internal locus of control are more successful than those who have external locus of control

In general, the researcher ‟ s concern is to find out some causes of anxiety among the 12 th graders before the English Test in the National Upper - Secondary

Examination at a school in Hanoi, and whether these findings tend to be consistent with MacDonald (2010)

Gonzalez (1995) stated that improving their testing skills would decrease their anxiety and make their scores better When preparing for standardized tests, it was recommend by Carter et al (2005) and Conner (2003) that if we increase skills in doing actual test, we should practice the same samples as the actual test Besides, Carter et al (2005) added that providing students with an explanation for each strategy, a set of opportunities to watch someone model the strategy, repeated opportunities for students to practice and applying the strategies by using practice tests could be considered the ways to reduce test anxiety

Woodard (2004) indicated that teachers could also apply techniques to prevent and reduce anxiety in class Providing students with clear explanations and suggested knowledge for revision was the solutions to anxiety To be more specific, it is useful to teach the students to acquire critical thinking and enthusiasm about the subject Moreover, giving feedback and partial credit, reviewing for exams, and offering alternative testing times may be the ways to decrease anxiety Oxford &

Vordick (2006) reported that although solutions to anxiety were incomplete, it might assist teachers in incorporating greater structures into the lesson plans, and encourage an interactive classroom that will stimulate questions

Generally, appropriate learning strategies can also help student recall, store, and apply the knowledge while they are studying However, which strategies and how are applied effectively is referred in the study with a view to reducing the students ‟ test anxiety before the test In particular, the solutions to anxiety in the studies of (Woodard, 2004) and (Oxford & Vordick, 2006) considered to conduct this study with the author ‟ s participants to find out the suitable ways to reduce test anxiety before the English Test in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination.

Review of previous related studies

In fact, the studies of anxiety and test anxiety have drawn much attention of researchers in Vietnam as well as other countries

Antwi-Danso, Amissah and Effrim (2015) carried out a survey of the relationship between test anxiety and academic achievements of third-year senior high school students in the Agona Municipality of Ghana with 270 participants The results revealed that students should be orientated towards study skills acquisition as well as anxiety reduction strategies for better results

Olaitan and Moroluyo (2014) aimed at investigating how the test anxiety, studying habits, and locus of control affected the academic performance among college students with 508 participants by employing questionnaire The study ascertained that there was a close relationship between academic performance, non- cognitive and socio-psychological changes Therefore, early intervention and immediate prevention programs were developed and applied, which would aid to reduce students ‟ anxiety Particularly, good study strategies such as evaluating the understanding level, making sense of the information from the textbook and realizing the aim of learning a particular thing were developed

Augustina Dubem Nwajei (2013) conducted the study of “Test anxiety, depression and academic performance: Assessment and arrangement using relaxation and cognitive restructuring techniques” with a view to investigating the changes in degrees of anxiety among 420 participants at senior secondary The results show that test anxiety, trait anxiety, and depression existed together and have a positive relationship, and they had negative effect on academic performance

Besides, it is better to combine the relaxation with the cognitive restructuring treatment to reduce anxiety and depression instead of relaxation treatment alone

The findings thus present the effectiveness of cognitive therapy in controlling anxiety and depression and improving academic performance

In the context of Vietnam, Hoang Thi Mai Hoa (2011) was concerned about factors affecting the students‟ English oral presentation skills by using questionnaire instrument to carry out the study at Hanoi Tourism College with the

106 participants She drew conclusion from the findings that the expressions of the ideas with words was pronounced exactly, the fluency in presentation and creating a good manner were three of the factors having influence on the skills of oral presentation in English Besides, she believed that poorly - prepared plan was also one of the factors of the students‟ English oral presentation skills

Ho Thi Anh (2013) did a survey of students ‟ anxiety conducted in five first- year classes with the participants of 50 students in speaking class at Academy of policy and development The main instruments of the study were interview and questionnaire These findings showed that personal and interpersonal problems were causes of anxiety in speaking among students

From the previous studies related to the research problems, the writer conducted the study on the 12 th grader students at a school in Hanoi as the target population.

Summary

This chapter has established the theoretical background concerned with the topic of the research It has mentioned definition of anxiety and test anxiety, causes of test anxiety and its solutions and previous related studies The next chapter will show the findings and results from questionnaires and interviews in detail.

METHODOLOGY

The context of the study

The study was conducted at Huynh Thuc Khang high school when all students at the school prepared knowledge for the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination for the university entrance or other purposes The students at school have English three lessons (periods) which mainly based on the textbook a week and the contents of the lessons of textbook are chiefly taught in the morning

In addition, the 12th graders did several of samples of the English Test to revise knowledge for the compulsory examination 8 periods per week (45 minutes each)

The number of the 12 th students at Huynh Thuc Khang high school is estimated at

200 students with differences in levels of English Particularly, the students are facing many difficulties in preparing for an examination

The participants in this study were 84 students of the class 12A and 12B in the academic year 2016-2017 After the Ministry of education and training had provided the 12 th students with the sample of tests, the teacher-researcher wondered how the learners should do to master skills and knowledge for an actual examination Hence, the researcher selected them as the participants in the Survey Research to find out causes of anxiety and solutions for helping the students to do the actual examination with the flying colour.

Research methodology

Survey Research Design (SRD) defined

“A survey research is a study of a large group (a population) through direct study of a subset of that group (a sample)”

A survey design uses various data collection procedures to enable the teacher-researcher-educator-educator (TREE) to investigate a construct by asking questions of either fact (descriptive) or opinion (explanatory) from a sample of a population with a view to generalizing to the population The term survey is an umbrella term that allows for many data collection procedures including questionnaires, interviews, and observations

Survey design can generate not only descriptive summary but also generalized statements based on large databases (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison,

Survey design is good for providing information for curriculum development, including needs analysis and program evaluation, as well as researching certain topics (Brown, 1997)

It is also good at collecting data on groups too large to observe directly (Babbie, 2004) Furthermore, the data collection instruments (questionnaires) used to gather data in a relatively short time to get the results analyzed statistically

Based on the definition mentioned, Survey Research is appropriate for this study Firstly, this aim of the research was to find out the causes of anxiety by asking the students designed questions concerning opinions or attitude of the learners towards the problem done by the researcher Secondly, the researcher did a survey with a small sample of the class 12A and 12 B mainly before the actual examination Therefore, with the good points of the Survey Research provided by (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2000, p 171), (Brown, 1997), and Babbie, 2004), the researcher selected the survey research to gain the expected results

2.2.3 Main steps in conducting Survey Research

2.2.4 Data collection instruments 2.2.4.1 Survey Questionnaires

Part 1 Perceived Threat of tests 6

Lay, Edwards, Parker, Endler (1989), Schwarzer and Jerusalem (1992) presented that students who suffered from high-test anxiety tended to perceive tests as threatening events because they saw the next evaluative situations as a stressful event

Bandalos, Yates, Thorndike-Christ (1995) Schutz, and Davis (2000) provided Students‟ explanations for this perceived threat are that they have a generalized low-self efficacy for testing or the specific subject matter is complex and difficult

Students‟ perceptions of testing events were evaluated prior to taking the test with the 6 items Perceived Threat of Tests developed for the purposes of this study (See Appendix 1) focuses on the awareness of the next test as threatening, either due to general difficulty of course content or personal barriers to success on the test

Participants respond to a five -point Likert type scale, with responses ranging from

“strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

Everson, Smodlaka, and Tobias (1995) revealed that students experienced high-test anxiety when they had deficits in encoding and storage processes associated with reading materials during preparation for tests

Culler & Holohan (1980) and Wittmaier (1972) claimed that the inability to employ effective study skills prevented students with test anxiety from cognitive processes Furthermore, they showed that students with high-test anxiety studied much more than their low anxiety peers but the study methods were highly repetitive and less effective

Study skills include a set of six items regarding the habits and skills students used to prepare for exams or gather the materials related to the exams Participants respond to a five-point Likert - type scale, with responses ranging from “strongly disagrees” to “strongly agree.” (See Appendix 1)

Schwarzer and Jerusalem (1992) represented that as students experienced situations involving internally based attributions for failure, it assured that the upcoming tests were likely to be threatening In other words, students would move beyond the motivational „„Challenge Stage‟‟ and progress into a stage where threat is dominant In cases where the students develop attributions that have the locus of control externalized, the development of a „„Loss of Control‟‟ perspective is prompted

Students‟ perceptions and beliefs about performance were gathered with 5 items Participants responded to these items using the five-point Likert - type scale, ranging from „„strongly disagree‟‟ to „„strongly agree” Test performance attributions focuses on the poor preparation and performance beyond the control ( See Appendix 1)

In general, to avoid being constrained by the use of a second language, the researcher translated all of the questions in the survey into Vietnamese, because the levels of English are not good enough to understand all the contents of the questions

The interview for students consists of five items conducted in Vietnamese, which were open enough to allow the interviewees to be free to express themselves and assists the participants to express fully their views of being constrained by the use of a second language Then all their answers to the questions were translated into English to use in this study

There are three parts in the interview In the first part, question 1 related to attitude towards anxiety was raised The purpose of this part was to find out whether students had experienced the feelings of anxiety or not The second part with question 2 focused on the main causes of anxiety among the 12 th graders before the English Test in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination The third part with question 3, 4, and 5 aimed to finding solutions to this problem The data from the interviews analyzed aimed at providing the researcher with a deep understanding of the problems, on which the researchers based to find possible solutions to anxiety

The interview for teachers is composed of five items The interview carried out in Vietnamese for the teachers to express more and more opinions in a short of time Afterwards, all their answers to the questions were translated into English with a view to using in the study

The interview consists of three parts The first part (Question1) designed concentrated on finding out whether students were nervous or not The second part with question 2, 3, and 4 was to explore causes of anxiety The last one (Question 5) was to find out the possible solutions to anxiety

Summary

This chapter presented the research settings, the participants, followed by Survey Research definition, the major steps of survey Next, the chapter gave the details about description of data collection instruments, data collection procedures and data analysis procedures The following chapter will give the details about the findings and results of the study.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS

Descriptive statistics

3.1.1 Descriptive statistics of causes related to knowledge content and personal barrier

As can be seen from the table above of reliability statistics and (See Table 1, Appendix 4), the value of Cronbach's Alpha = 0.863 > 0.6 Furthermore, Corrected Item-Total Correlation of coefficients > 0.3 Cronbach's Alpha if Item Deleted values of numbers was lower than the values of Corrected Item-Total Correlation

There were no redundant items Consequently, all the questions were suitable and all the answers of the students were reliable enough to analyze

3.1.2 Descriptive statistics of some factors concerning studying habits and gathering related materials

It is clear that the value of Cronbach's Alpha = 0.895 > 0.6 based on the table above of the reliability statistics, Corrected Item-Total Correlation of coefficients >

0.3 (See Table 2, Appendix 4) In addition, Cronbach's Alpha if Item Deleted values of numbers was lower than the values of Corrected Item-Total Correlation No items became redundant As a result, all the questions were suitable and all the answers of the students were reliable enough to analyze

3.1.3 Descriptive statistics of causes related to poor preparation and performance beyond control

It can be seen from the table above that the value of Cronbach's Alpha 0.894 > 0.6 And Corrected Item-Total Correlation values of the coefficients > 0.3 (See Table 3, Appendix 4) The Cronbach's Alpha if Item Deleted value of numbers was lower than Corrected Item-Total Correlation values so there were no redundant items As a result, all the questions were suitable and all of the answers by the students were reliable enough to analyze

3.1.4 Descriptive statistics of solutions to anxiety

As it was seen from the table above that the value of Cronbach's Alpha

=0.869 > 0.6 The Corrected Item-Total Correlation values of the coefficients > 0.3 (See Table 4, Appendix 4) The Cronbach's Alpha if Item Deleted value of numbers was lower than Corrected Item-Total Correlation values so there were no redundant items As a result, all the questions were suitable and all of the answers by the students were reliable enough to analyze

Kaiser-Meyer- Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy .765

Table 5: KMO and Bartlett's Test

It is clear that Reliability statistics KMO shows the value of KMO = 0.765 >

0.7 and Reliability statistics Barlett indicates result was significant (sig = 0.000 <

0.01) As a result, Component Analysis was suitable

According to the statistics of the Total Variance Explained (See Table 6, Appendix 4), three sorts of major suitable causes (Eigenvalues = 2.37 > 1) were selected after having been analyzed The Eigenvalues = 2.37 > 1 accounting for 66.414% variance of the total 17 items

Based on Rotated Component Matrix a (See Table 8, Appendix 4), there main types of causes were gathered

- The causes involving knowledge contents and personal barrier from 1 to 6

- The causes involving studying habits and gathering related materials from 7 to 12

- The causes involving poor preparation and performance beyond control from 13 to 17

Quantitative description of results from the questionnaire and qualitative

3.2.1 Causes related to knowledge content and personal barrier

N0 Causes Strongly disagree Disagree Agree partly Agree Strongly agree

I feel anxious when I do samples of tests with difficult idioms and phrases

I feel nervous when I do reading comprehension of samples of tests containing special vocabularies

I am not confident to do samples of tests before an actual examination

I feel anxious when time I prepare for an actual exam goes by too quickly

5 I feel nervous when I only have 3 English lessons a week

I feel anxious when I am not able to concentrate on the English exams much

Table 6: Causes related to knowledge content and personal barrier

Items 1 and 2 refer to causes related to knowledge content The data in table

6 indicates that the majority of the students at Huynh Thuc Khang high school believed that the difficult content of the exams made them anxious Particularly, they had to do many samples of tests with words and structures that they had not learned before For item 1, approximately 88.1% agreed and completely agreed with the view above, in comparison to 21.4% partly agreeing and 2.4% disapproving and completely disagreeing Besides, they felt anxious when they had to do reading comprehension with too many new words For item 2, only around 11.9% of students partly approved of the idea mentioned while approximately 85.7% approved and completely approved of it

Items 3, 4, 5 and 6 refer to causes related to personal barrier including pressure of time to prepare for examination, ability of concentration and lack of confidence Of all the causes, the students at Huynh Thuc Khang high school felt nervous when they did not have enough time to prepare for an actual examination

They found that having English lessons 3 times a week is not enough to obtain required knowledge for the examination Moreover, they believed that they were anxious when the time they spent on preparations passed too fast: only approximately 15.5% of the students partly agreed and 1.2% disagreed

The findings from questionnaire show that the difficult content and pressure of time on preparation of knowledge for English examination were the two major causes of anxiety

From the interview for students, several students claimed that it was rather difficult for them to deal with all the questions They tended to be exhausted when facing the content of the English examination, which made them anxious In particular, students always looked forward to othershelp them do exercises because of their exhaustion Moreover, students shared the ideas that they have never known some structures and vocabularies in the samples of tests before Students B, C, E, F,

G, and H said that the complicated content prevented them from working out the correct answer effectively (See question 2, Appendix 2)

May be, I seemed not to study hard for the examination; I only spend 5 days preparing for it Moreover, working out so many difficult questions in English exams makes me exhausted If so, I usually select the answers randomly

Preparing knowledge for the test takes me up not much time In fact, I expect others to help me In addition, the content seems to prevent me from offering the answers a great deal I often spend the breaks among the lessons getting ready for the English samples made by the teachers (Student F)

I seem never to meet with the structures and some new words I find them rather new to me Therefore, I choose the answer randomly, Sometimes, I also find materials for extra samples, but I do not know which ones and authors suitable for the English exams Moreover, there are too many compulsory subjects for the national exams so I have to separate the amounts of time for each subject And I find myself have not much time for it (Student G)

When doing the samples given by the teacher, I only complete it at about half of the allotted time May be, the content is also a barrier to me Sometimes it challenges me a lot Actually, I really want to improve it but I do not what and where I can find the best extra books for it (Student H)

The results from the interview for students reveal that the difficulties in knowledge content were a barrier to them In other words, they were nervous when the content was too complicated

From the interviews for teachers, six out of seven teachers hold the idea that students at Huynh Thuc Khang high school were anxious when they had to so many samples of tests containing many new words and difficult structures In other words, they skipped the difficult ones or chose the answer randomly As a result, they took no interest in doing the next samples of tests

The students felt rather anxious They were tired of doing this kind of test samples Sometimes, they did not do the difficult exercises because they thought these questions were out of their abilities (Teacher A)

In my opinion, my students were confused when facing questions related to vocabularies such as phrasal verbs, idioms, and collocations They said to me that they tried to do the questions except for the ones associated with the vocabularies and reading comprehension (Teacher B)

According to me, my students felt nervous when they had to do types of questions containing difficult contents They seemed to complete three questions of reading comprehension They chose the answers to the rest randomly As a result, they did not seem to take pleasure in the next samples of tests (Teacher C)

According to me, doing reading comprehension with so many new words seemed to make the students uninterested in doing the samples of tests Therefore, they did not want to try more (Teacher D)

From point of my view, my students were anxious when meeting with the samples of tests with too many new words They confided in me that they only made their efforts to work out the answers to the questions concerning grammar and structures (Teacher E)

The results from the interviews for teachers show that the complex content of knowledge was one of the causes of students ‟ anxiety

Summary

In this chapter, the researcher provided data analysis and findings on both causes of students ‟ anxiety and solutions from the results of the interview and questionnaires The next chapter will sum up the entire study

Recapitulation

The study conducted with the support of the previous related studies on anxiety aimed at investigating causes of anxiety and solutions to answer with a view to translating into two research questions:

1 What are the main causes of anxiety among the 12 th graders before the English Test in the National Upper-Secondary Graduation Examination?

2 What are some possible solutions to anxiety?

To have answers to the research questions above, the study was carried out in class 12A and 12B at Huynh Thuc Khang high school by using questionnaire and interviews in order to answer two research questions above Furthermore, the Survey Method employed to design the study and the software SPSS used to calculate the results from the questionnaire provided the following results

Causes and solutions related to knowledge content, personal barrier, and pressure of time

As for the causes of anxiety, almost all of the students expressed negative attitudes towards contents of the test samples They were aware that the difficult contents in samples they had done before the examination made them anxious

Therefore, their heads went blank when they had to such samples of tests

For the solutions, teachers should design a set of samples of tests associated with knowledge content teachers taught students at school and suitable for students‟ levels, which helps students have a better orientation for revisions In other words, teachers should spend more time selecting a variety of exercises associated with kinds of questions in the National Upper – Secondary graduation examination

Besides, teachers had better make some lesson plans on the steps to do kinds of questions in reading comprehension and pronunciation in order for students to work out the difficult exercises in an actual examination Moreover, students themselves should raise awareness of doing exercises everyday to obtain knowledge enough for an actual examination

Causes and solutions associated with studying habits and related materials

As for the causes of anxiety, the major reason why students felt nervous was that it was difficult for them to collect materials for revisions before the examination In fact, they did not know what kinds of exercises sources were suitable for them They spent a lot of time looking for materials but they did not find any useful materials for the actual examination and related to the contents of lectures teachers provided at school

For the solution, it would be good idea if teachers introduced certain names of books, authors, and publishers suitable for students to find out what kinds of books were qualified for preparations In addition, students should spend more time downloading exercises on idioms, phrasal verbs, and reading comprehension from reliable sources that teachers provided

Causes and solutions related to poor preparation and performance beyond control

As for the causes of anxiety, the majority of the students felt nervous when there were too many structures and vocabularies not provided by the teachers in the samples of tests before the examination

For the solution, I think that teachers should focus on providing students with essential vocabularies and major structures of each unit in the textbook before giving them samples of test, which assists students in not only enriching their knowledge but also making students more confident of knowledge preparation for actual examinations Furthermore, teachers should design more samples of tests based on various sources of books to make students do with an aim at helping them build up better skills for an actual examination

The findings of the causes of anxiety and some possible solutions in this study can be beneficial to English teachers and students at high school in using it as reference

As for teaching, some possible suitable solutions to teaching with an aim to making studentsless anxious are clear Teachers can decide which solutions they should use to prevent students from anxiety Furthermore, teachers are able to offer all the solutions to the class where there are a number of students with different causes of anxiety

In terms of learning, causes of students ‟ anxiety are also clear Students can make it easier to find out what difficulties they are meeting with to make choice of which suitable solutions to make good preparations for the actual examination

3 Limitations and suggestions for further study

In terms of limitations, the study was limited to class 12A and 12B including

84 participants at Huynh Thuc Khang high school, which might not be the representative of all students at the same level in Vietnam

Despite the limitation above, the researcher believes that this study is beneficial to the 12 th graders at Huynh Thuc Khang high school in the period of revision before the English examination

In terms of suggestions for further study, conducting a study of anxiety is complicated Hence, a similar study should focus on conducting the study with a bigger size to find out other causes of students ‟ anxiety This study is a kind of psychological research so the same study ought to concentrate on exploring another aspect of the issue including the relationship between test anxiety and performance

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Limitations and suggestions for further study