Exploring Speaking Anxiety of Non-English Department Students

Abstract

The study's goal is to identify the barriers to speaking that EFL learners face at the tertiary level. Speaking anxiety is one of the issues. The levels and factors of speaking anxiety become the focus of this research. This study also investigates speaking anxiety factors experienced by EFL learners. Three factors contribute to speaking anxiety: communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and a lack of self-confidence. The Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Scale (FLSAS) was adopted to reveal the degree of speaking anxiety. The semi-structured interview was conducted with nine students to explore the source of anxiety. This study involved 81 participants from the Informatics Engineering department students at State Polytechnic of Malang. The findings revealed that Informatics Engineering department students demonstrated a moderate level of speaking anxiety. Furthermore, the study found that low self-confidence is among the highest average of speaking anxiety, followed by fear of negative evaluation and communication apprehension