ANXIETY PRESSURE AND ITS EFFECTS ON SPEAKING SKILL The Case of First-Year Foreign Language Learners at Belhadj Bouchaib university centre

Abstract

Anxiety is one of the key issues in the use of speaking skill for foreign language learners. This study is conducted in order to explore the nature of speaking English as foreign language anxiety among first year students at Belhadj Bouchaib university centre. This study attempts to realize three main objectives. First, it aims to recognize the learners’ language anxiety nature. Second, to investigate the possible factors behind learners’ speaking anxiety. Third, to discover what are the appropriate strategies used by teachers to reduce their student’s anxiety. For the purpose of collecting data, the instrument employed is a questionnaire that was addressed to five (05) teachers from the department of English, and another one distributed to a sample of forty (40) EFL students at the same department. This questionnaire contains 21 items related to the degree of EFL speaking anxiety and the causes attributed to. It is a modified version of the original Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) developed by Horowitz et al. (1986) which is composed of 33 items. The questionnaire findings revealed that the fear of negative evaluation is the most experienced kind of anxiety by EFL students. Moreover, prime sources of language anxiety are communication apprehension with teacher, fear of being laughed by peers. Furthermore, the results also illustrate different strategies in which the students and teachers can rely on to minimize or reduce foreign language speaking anxiety and help students to develop their speaking skill.