Students’ Speaking Anxiety in English Class

Abstract

This research aimed to find out the level of students’ speaking anxiety students in English class and the most dominant factors that caused students’ speaking anxiety faced by the third grade students of Junior High School in SMPN 15 Bengkulu in English Classroom. This research used descriptive quantitative design with questionnaire as the instrument. The questionnaire of this research was Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) proposed by Horwitz et al. (1983). The data has been analyzed by using SPSS program. The population of this research was the third grade students in SMPN 15 Bengkulu. The total is 7 classes: class A, Class B, Class C, Class D, Class E, Class F, and Class G. The total number of population is 163 students. From 7 classes, the researcher decided to take only 20% of student each. The result of this research showed that the majority of the students of the third-grade were Mildly Anxious level and the most dominant factors causing the student speaking anxiety was the Fear of Negative Evaluation. According to the result, most of the students were already feel anxious about the fact that they had to speak in a group or individually and also being evaluated by the teacher in front of the English class. In conclusion, the researcher found that students are afraid to speak up in front of the class because they always think that other students will laugh at them and judge the student who speaks in front of the class. This might make the student’s speaking anxiety arise and make them to stay silent instead of speaking.

Communication students’ anxiety in speaking skill practice

“…To understand the phenomenon that occurs in ESP class, the researcher believed the qualitative approach was to solve speaking issues at UNISBA Blitar and it was very useful for the researcher to get a better insight into speaking anxiety in ESP Class. Sinaga et al's (2020) study emphasized that speaking anxiety to students at UNISBA Blitar was a natural phenomenon. The characteristic of this approach would unveil the factors of speaking anxiety as a natural phenomenon and it would answer the other research problems.…”

“…The students (ESP class) at UNISBA Blitar need a creative lecturer because English speaking can be a stressful activity. Speaking English may be a problematic practice since it is not used as the primary language of speech (Sinaga et al, 2020).…”

“…In learning English speaking, there is a challenge for students majoring in communication studies at UNISBA Blitar, namely speaking Anxiety. Speaking anxiety occurs in students' daily activities (Sinaga et al, 2020). Speech anxiety is better characterized by nervousness during a presentation.…”

“…For example, a student who experienced an extreme level of speaking anxiety, that student will not dare to talk in public and prefer to be in a closed space. Anxiety experienced by the students at UNISBA Blitar is a widespread phenomenon (Sinaga et al, 2020).…”

An Investigation on Perceived Anxiety and Speaking Skills: the Case of Indonesian EFL Student Teachers

“…The questionnaire results were classified into five levels of anxiety, namely: very anxious, anxious, mildly anxious, relaxed, and very relaxed (Sinaga et al, 2020). The distribution of anxiety levels is presented in Table 4.2: The result showed that the majority of students (each 32 or 46.4%) perceived mildly anxious and relaxed in their speaking class.…”