A Case Study of Students’ Anxiety in Speaking English and How They Cope the Feeling

Abstract

In learning English, there are four basic skills that students have to master. They are listening, speaking, reading and writing. Speaking is one of the important skills to be mastered by students as a foreign Language. Today, speaking becomes a challenging task for every student. It is in line with what Tsiplakides (2009) stated that speaking anxiety is a person’s reluctance to participate in conversations using a particular language and this may arise because learners are unable to understand the existing psychological conditions and are used to letting the situation drag on (Zhiping and Paramasivam 2013). Every student has a different psychological condition; some students can speak confidently in front of the class while some cannot. One of the problems the students face is whenever they try to speak English, they feel nervous. In this research, the researcher investigated the students’ anxiety in speaking English and how they cope the feeling. The objectives of this research were to examines factors that cause EFL learners in Indonesia to feel anxious about speaking English. Besides, the study explores how the students cope with their anxiety. This research used case study as the research design. Through qualitative case study design, the researcher could investigate deeply the real situation that happened in the teaching and learning process. To get the data of this research, as the researcher, I used classroom observation, questionnaire and interview. Classroom observation was done four times for selecting some students as the participant of this research. In collecting the data, the questionnaire was done one time by giving it to the selected participant to make sure they felt anxious in speaking English. In addition, interview was done one time to students in order to get further information related to the respondents’ responses to the questionnaire and better understanding of sources and factors of anxiety and also how to cope the anxiety. Based on the result of the classroom observation, the researcher chosed three students who had tended to have speaking anxiety indications based on the characteristics of anxious students that illustrated by Oxford (1999). In this research, I applied the model of Miles and Hubberman (1994) in analyzing the data. Those steps are data reduction, data display, and conclusion and verification. The result of this research showed that there are some students who were learning English in class especially in speaking class had excessive fear and anxiety. For this reason, they were being passive in classroom discussion. They were mostly anxious in speaking activities such as speaking in front of the class, being called on by the teacher or waiting turn to speak. The researcher reported some factors which were the main cause of their speaking anxiety. From those three participants, there were 2 participants who exhibited test anxiety and the other one exhibited in communication apprehension. Therefore, the researcher also reported how they overcame the anxiety. Those strategies are; avoiding eye contact, relaxation, and asking teachers’ help. The result of this research is expected to give meaningful contribution especially for the English teacher and other researchers. For the English teachers, they should understand the psychological symptoms of teaching English as a foreign language. Then, they have to make a variation of teaching strategy such as playing game or another fun activities to reduce the students’ anxiety and help the students by provoking them with a little help. On the other hand, for other researchers, it will be better to conduct a study in investigating the innefectiveness of the teacher’s role in helping the students to cope with their speaking anxiety especially in English.