English as a Foreign Language and Job Achievement: Moderating Role of Test Anxiety.

The purpose of this research study is to explore the moderating role of test anxiety in the relationship between the English language proficiency and job achievement in Pakistan. There was a dire need to carry out this research to highlight the components of the test anxiety faced by the job-candidates to find out how they can deal with them to perform better in their English language test/interview. The quantitative tool of FLCAS helped find out that English language test has a positive impact on job achievement, and test anxiety plays a moderating role between EFL test and Job achievement, whereas, the qualitative tool of interview served the purpose of finding the factors causing anxiety among the test-takers/interviewees. The major factors among these are lack of EFL training, failure apprehension, negative evaluation and level of comfort. Descriptive statistics measured using SPSS 20 (mean, standard deviation), correlation matrix and regression analysis were used to test the propositions or hypotheses, whereas the qualitative data was then given a graphical representation form followed by the interpretative analyses of the responses. Anxiety was found to be the consequence of inadequate skills required to use the target language. The major recommendations, which surfaced as a result of the research in the present study included i) the understanding of the importance of the English language in job achievements so as to introduce English language learning from the early age, ii) having more exposure of English language in the field through some means like simulations, etc., giving/getting more exposure to the culture of the place where English is spoken, iii) and controlling anxiety by having focused training or practice of the English language skills required in the job. All this may help reduce the test anxiety and facilitate in job achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]