As an essential part of EFL academic practices, writing is the most required skill in higher-education context. Subsequently, the requirement of having a high command of English writing skill emerges as one of the most important criteria for qualified EFL graduates. In reality, many students are still struggling to write academically in proper way, especially in undergraduate level since they are novices to academic writing practices. As a result, writing anxiety hinders the process of academic writing that affects the quality as well as perception of writing among students. Thus, the present study aims to investigate five EFL undergraduate students' perspectives on their academic writing practices in relation to the challenges of writing anxiety. The study was conducted through the lens of qualitative case study. Two primary data sources were collected and triangulated, i.e., semi-structured interview, and document analysis. Participants' experiences in dealing with anxiety during the learning and writing process were inquired through a semi-structured individual interview, which subsequent responses are clarified through an analysis of learners' academic essays to cross-check the whole data. The findings showed that the least anxious learner showed better writing performance then those who showed higher levels of anxiety. While the most prominent aspects that learners felt anxious about were lack of English writing practices, poor understanding of grammar rules, insufficient vocabulary, and fear of negative evaluation.
This study is primarily aimed to study the validity and reliability of teacher-made assessment for English mid-term examination used in evaluating students' learning experience: to what extent the test quality is in term of content validity, reliability, index of difficulty, index of discrimination, and effectiveness of distractors. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected, analyzed, and interpreted by employing a descriptive and exploratory study on teacher-made English midterm test as well as 20 students' answer sheets as the source of data. The source of data was collected from participants in one private Islamic Senior High School in Kuningan, West Java. Document analysis was conducted to pull out the findings of the study. The test items were observed through its representation in syllabus to reveal its content validity. Then, the students' answers were analyzed using Anates software version 4 to determine the reliability, index of difficulty, index of discrimination, and effectiveness of distractors of the test. The findings of the study show that content validity and reliability were considered good. However, some items were found to be either too easy or too difficult in terms of its index of difficulty. The test also had 50% poor discrimination index and 40% ineffective distractors. Therefore, it is suggested for the teacher to consider a further revision on the English mid-term examination they made for improving of its quality.
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