Reflections from teachers and students on speaking anxiety in an EFL classroom

• Authors: Songyut Akkakoson
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper reports on part of the research project in which instructor perspectives on the role of anxiety in an EFL speaking classroom and anxiety-coping strategies students employ when speaking English have been investigated. The existence of students’ speaking anxiety was revealed via a teacher interview. A total of 88 students from the intact classes also responded to an interview form for an analysis of anxiety-coping strategies they utilised when speaking English in class. The qualitative data from both instruments was analysed using the content analysis. The findings of the teacher interview data put forward that students of this study have experienced speaking-in-class anxiety. This anxiety may influence their grades, to some extent. Three factors that may hinder students’ development of oral skills emerge, including their lack of self-confidence, having poor English background and having neither intrinsic nor extrinsic motivation to use English. Using the target language as the medium of communication in class is viewed by the teachers as a must in theory, but flexibility is allowed in practice. Moreover, the results of the student interview data show a wide range of strategies employed to deal with anxiety (ie social, affective, meta-cognitive, compensatory, cognitive and memory-related strategies). Social strategies are the most frequently-used techniques. Suggestions for improvement in the overall oral English (ie vocabulary focus, audiovisual focus, self-practice, social focus, auditory focus, meta-cognitive focus, compensatory focus and affective focus) have also been given by the student participants. An increased repertoire of vocabulary is viewed as the most effective tool for such improvement.

Keywords

EN

foreign language anxiety; speaking anxiety; oral English; anxiety-coping strategies

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Journal of Language and Cultural Education
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 46-70

Dates

published

2016-09-01

online

2016-11-08

Contributors

author

Songyut Akkakoson

• King Mongkut’s University of Technology,

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/jolace-2016-0025