WEB-BASED LISTENING EXAM ACCEPTANCE: COMPARING FRESHMAN AND SOPHOMORE STUDENTS AT A VOCATIONAL COLLEGE

Abstract

Assessing learner performance in a foreign language teaching setting has always been a challenge for instructors due to pragmatic reasons and Web-based Exams (WBEs) have been lending a helpful hand with assessment procedures by virtue of their advantages of security, cost, accuracy, and time saving. Being increasingly popular in recent years, WBEs are attributed to be effective methods of testing and evaluation, because they not only reduce time and effort required for exam generation and scheduling, but also enable more efficient recording, grading, and further analysis on the results. For this reason, a growing number of secondary and higher education institutions are adopting WBEs to evaluate their students’ achievement. However, there is another significant issue as much as employing WBEs in educational settings: learners’ acceptance of WBEs. Building on this point, this study aims to investigate the factors influencing language learners’ acceptance of WBEs in terms of the following variables: Goal Expectancy, Social Influence, Facilitating Conditions, Computer Self Efficacy, Content, Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Playfulness, and Behavioral Intention. The study was conducted in 2014–2015 academic year with the freshman and sophomore students of ‘English as a Foreign Language’ course at a vocational college. The data were collected via an online questionnaire from 602 participants having used the web-based listening comprehension exam system and analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics (independent-samples t-test). The overall results of the study indicated that the participants were not inclined to use WBEs although sophomore students favored WBEs slightly more than the freshman students did. The inferential analysis put forward a significant difference between freshman and sophomore students in terms of all factors except goal expectancy. In this sense, it is assumed that having more experience with WBEs could create a positive orientation in the students’ acceptance of WBEs.