A Case Study: Indonesian Students’ Speaking anxiety in Learning English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This research was to investigate the factors contributing to the students’ speaking anxiety in learning a foreign language and to find out English language teachers’ suggestions to reduce the students’ anxiety in learning a foreign language. The participants of this research were a total of 94 third-year students and 5 English language teachers teaching in the same school. The data collection instruments used in this study were the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), which was developed by Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope (1986) and a structured interview. The findings of this study indicated that almost half of the participants experience communication anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, test anxiety and English class anxiety. The participant teachers’ suggestions to reduce the students’ speaking anxiety included frequent involvement in language practice and vocabulary building activities; building the students’ confidence in speaking by creating a low-anxiety classroom atmosphere; using group work activities so as to reduce student mistakes through peer support; correcting the student mistakes indirectly in front of their peers; using media and entertaining language teaching materials to engage the students speaking practice and the teachers taking the role of a facilitator in language classrooms so as to support the students in their language learning process.

Keywords

• Speaking anxiety,teaching English

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