Socio-affective factors that influenced the toefl itp test results of undergraduate students in English at Unicordoba

Abstract

This research aimed to explore the socio-affective factors that affected the performance on the TOEFL ITP test of undergraduate students in basic education with emphasis in Humanities-English at University of Córdoba. This study used a qualitative approach and a descriptive case study design, which is an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case within real-world contexts. After the analysis of results, it was found a set of socio-affective factors such as anxiety, insecurity, and demotivation which influenced graduates’ outcomes in the test. The main aspects that generated anxiety were time pressure, that is, the lack of time to answer all the test questions; the technicality and rigor of the texts, which in turn generated a type of physical anxiety such as mental or physical exhaustion. Also, the poor sound conditions generated by the poor quality of the audios. All of these generated negative feelings which evidenced a decreasing TOEFL ITP results. Some pedagogical suggestions are made such as a socio-affective strategy training during the international preparation course in order to mitigate these feelings and be more successful in the test. Keywords:, socio-affective factors, foreign language testing, graduates, TOEFL-ITP test.