EFL Students’ Test Preparation Practices in the Nepalese context

Abstract

It has widely been claimed that a language test has huge impact on teaching and learning the language. However, the nature of test impact on students’ out-of-class learning practices, particularly in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context, is under-researched. The study reported in this paper explored EFL students’ out-of-class test preparation practices in a high-stakes test context in Nepal. The data generated through a survey (N=226), students’ oral diaries (N=72), and semi-structured interviews with students and parents (N=24) indicated that the majority of students employed memorisation as a chief strategy to learn English and they rarely used language skills development (LSD) strategies such as reading books/ magazines/ newspapers in English, watching movies/programmes in English, and writing in English. Furthermore, almost all the students took private tuition classes to prepare themselves for the test. All these practices indicate that they had a major focus on increasing the test scores rather than on enhancing their English language proficiency. However, there were several indications that students employed several LSD strategies during the regular learning period (i.e., around seven months before the test). Implications of the findings have been discussed.

Keywords

• test preparation
• test impact
• high-stakes test
• strategies
• English as a foreign language

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