The Levels of English-Speaking Anxiety and Factors Contributing to the Anxiety of Junior High School Students

Abstract

Most EFL learners reported experiencing Foreign Language Anxiety which makes them timid and avoid taking part in the language class (Horwitz et al., 1986). Especially, Junior high school students reported experiencing the highest level of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (Dewaele & Macintyre, 2014). Foreign Language Anxiety is a student’s bad emotional reaction related to self-perception, behaviors, and beliefs toward the process of learning a foreign language (Horwitz et al., 1986). Furthermore, it was revealed that one of the greatest sources of students’ Foreign Language Anxiety was speaking a foreign language in class. The majority of the students found speaking a foreign language challenging and highly provoking their anxiety (Suleimenova, 2013). Therefore, the present study aimed to fill the gap by investigating the levels of English-Speaking Anxiety and its sources experienced by junior high school students. Descriptive Research Design was applied for the present study and it involved 130 junior high school students that were randomly chosen through Stratified Random Sampling. The data were collected through the closed-ended questionnaire named Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Scale (FLSAS) Questionnaire adapted from Ozturk and Gurbuz (2014). Then, the collected data were analyzed using Descriptive Statistics with the help of SPSS Software. The finding revealed that about 65.4% of the junior high school students indicated experiencing English-Speaking Anxiety at the moderate level. Meanwhile, 24.6% of the participants indicated experiencing a high level of English-Speaking Anxiety, and 10% of the participants indicated experiencing a low level of English-Speaking Anxiety. Furthermore, the finding also showed that classroom procedures were the major provoking factor among those six factors of English-Speaking Anxiety that received an average score of students' agreed and strongly agreed responses to the items of about 107.67 points.