Anxiety in Classroom English Presentations: A Case Study in Korean Tertiary Educational Context

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine Korean students’ anxiety in classroom presentations in tertiary educational context through classroom observation, self-reported questionnaire and semi-structured interview. In the stage of classroom observation, the potential responsivities relating with anxiety were explored through the analysis of fieldwork notes; the questionnaires were filled out by the students after they finished their presentations to unveil the students’ perceptions of their anxiety and the causes for such anxiety; the semi-structured interview was carried out to provide further evidence for the above findings. The research participants were twenty two students majoring in English education in a Korean national university. The research findings indicated that Korean students suffered different degree of anxiety in the course of classroom presentations; the major responsivities to anxiety included repeatedly occurring subconscious behaviors, silence, speech disruptions and slow rate of speaking and so forth. Concerning the causes arousing anxiety in classroom presentations, there were four major sources, consisting of negative attitude towards classroom presentations, preparation time, language proficiency, negative feedback from peers, while other factors like making mistakes, attention from audience, and teachers’ feedback were not the major source for students’ anxiety. These research findings should shed new light on classroom teaching for language teachers to improve their curriculum design to relieve students’ anxiety in classroom presentations.

Investigating the Anxiety Factors among English for Specific Purposes Students in a Vocational Education setting

“…In Spain, ESP students were also identified to possess high and moderate level of anxiety (Amengual-Pizarro, 2018). This result was in line with several studies that most of the university students in EFL settings possessed moderate to high anxiety level (Gerencheal & Mishra, 2019;Tian, 2019).…”

Management and Science University BTESL Students' Perceptions towards Anxiety in Oral Presentation

“…preparation, number of presentations, self-confidence, teacher's feedback, audience's attention, and make mistakes. All of these factors were similar to previous studies such asFadlan (2020), Razawi, Zulkornain and Razlan (2019) andTian (2019).…”

“…Moreover, another essential finding showed that MSU BTESL students perceived and experienced all six factors presented as items in the questionnaire adapted from a previous article entitled "Anxiety in classroom English Presentations: A Case Study in Korean Tertiary Educational Context" by (Tian, 2019). The factors obtained were; preparation, number of presentations, self-confidence, teacher's feedback, audience's attention, and make mistakes, in which among all of these factors, preparation was the most prominent one.…”

“…The questionnaire was adapted from an article that was related to the research topic. The published article was "Anxiety in classroom English Presentations: A Case Study in Korean Tertiary Educational Context" by (Tian, 2019), however, the researcher had adapted the questionnaire from FLCAS (Horwitz et al, 1986). The questionnaire consists of 22 items, 10 of it to measure respondents' perceptions of anxiety in classroom and 12 of it were to measure factors of classroom speaking anxiety, which were evaluated through a six-point Likert scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree".…”

Students Anxiety Experiences in Higher Education Institutions

“…Tian [3] indicates Korean students face language anxiety when they must make presentations in class, and they lack language proficiency. Moreover, they feel anxiety because of their peers' negative feedback.…”