Abstract
Many EFL students show anxiety when speaking English in Indonesia. Therefore, the researchers were interested to conduct this study to find out the level of English-speaking anxiety experienced by those students. In this quantitative study, data were collected from 29 students through a questionnaire that was adopted from the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) consisted of 10 items developed by Horwitz, et al. (1986). The data from the questionnaire were analyzed by using the FLCAS questionnaire scale. The results were described in percentages and are further elaborated in narration. The data revealed that 11 out of 29 students (38%) experienced low-level anxiety, 17 out of 29 students (59%) had anxiety at a moderate level, and one out of 29 students (3,4%) got high-level anxiety. It means that most students experienced a moderate level of speaking anxiety. In this case, those findings can be the inputs for every English teacher, especially for the English teachers in which this study was conducted, to be aware of the level of their students’ English-speaking anxiety. It is hoped that the findings of this research can give information and add knowledge to English teachers about EFL students’ level of anxiety so that they could find an appropriate strategy to reduce their students’ speaking anxiety.
Highlights
Speaking is one of the English skills that should be learned by students including junior high school students
It shows that the lowest average score was 66 which indicates a low anxiety category and the highest score was 145 which indicates high anxiety category
As the objectives of this study are to find the level of English speaking anxiety experienced by the eighth-grade students of SMPN 1 Banda Aceh, the results showed that 59% of students experienced moderate level of speaking anxiety, 38% experienced low level of anxiety, and the remaining or only 3.4% of them experienced high level of anxiety
Summary
Speaking is one of the English skills that should be learned by students including junior high school students. Richards (2008) explained that speaking requires talking performance that includes the extent to which the speaker organizes information in an comprehensible order, the use of discourse markers, repetition, stress, etc. It means that in speaking activity the speakers must use oral language well to transfer the information to other people (Komariah et al, 2020). Until today, speaking is still being one of the students’ difficulties in learning English for many learners, especially in Indonesia (Fitriani & Zulkarnain, 2019; Halimah, 2018; Hanifa, 2018). Bada, et al (2011) said that speaking is one of the difficult English skills to improve because the students have limited time to recall words and to care for pronunciation, intonation, and responses, which interrupts the speech, and causes additional difficulties for the speaker
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