SPEAKING ANXIETY: FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO THE ANXIETY IN SPEAKING CLASS OF THE FIRST YEAR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT FACULTY OF LETTERS JEMBER UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Speaking is an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing and receiving and processing information (Brown, 1994; Burns & Joyce, 1997). Meanwhile, speaking English is a skill to communicate with other people in native language. This skill can be only attained by a lot of practice and attention. In speaking English the learners should know how to produce the specific point of language such as grammar, pronunciation, or vocabulary furthermore they also should understand when, why and in what ways to produce language. Language learning is affected a lot by affective factors. Affective factors are “those referring to personal-social-emotional behaviors of teachers and learners to the feeling tone of the learning environment generated by their interaction” (Richard E. Ripple; 1964:476-477). One of the affective factors is anxiety. Anxiety appears because of several factors such as lack of knowledge, low of preparation, fear of making mistakes and difficulty to understand the teacher instruction. Language speaking anxiety further appears on site often than other language learning like reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and writing comprehension. This thesis investigates Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) of the first year students of English Department Faculty of Letters in Jember University, to seek what factors contributing the anxiety and why anxiety happens by using the theories from Tseng (2012). The data on this study are obtained by employing closed-ended questionnaire which is adapted from Horwitz et al. (1986) and the transcript interview. Survey is chosen as the research strategy to gain that data. The participants are 50 first year students English Department of Faculty Letters, Jember University.

The results of the study shows that self-perception or self-esteem, presentation in the classroom, fear of making mistakes, social environment, gender, culture differences, formal classroom environment are determined as the source of the participants’ speaking anxiety. Selfperception or self-esteem has been chosen and becomes the dominant source of speaking anxiety. Social status in this researches no one who chooses it. It is because they have good elation with the lecturer and they have mastered the materials. Meanwhile the reason which evokes the occurrence of speaking anxiety shows. First is self-perception. This is because of language difficulties (lack of vocabulary, worry about structure and speaking English correctly), concern about others perception, low self-confidence, lack of motivation and lack of communication and afraid of making mistakes. Second is presentation in the classroom. This is because they are afraid of becomes the center of attention, afraid of question from other learners and they do not prepare the material. Third is fear of making mistakes. This is because of they do not master the material, lack of vocabulary and pronunciations. Fourth is social environment. This is because they have limited exposure to target language and judgment from other people. Fifth is gender. This is because each gender has different topic to discuss and different perception about the opposite gender. Sixth is a cultural difference. This is because they have different topic and different accent between Javanese, Madurese and Chinese. Seventh is formal classroom environment. This is because they are monitored by the lecturer and formal characteristic of the lecturer.