EFL Students' Speaking Anxiety across Academic Levels in Online Learning during Covid-19

Ita Ulhasanah

Abstract


Abstract : Speaking is deemed to be the most essential and complicated skill in learning a foreign language because it requires the ability to make someone or a group understand the content of speaking itself. Most of the students still struggle and find it difficult to present using the English language. One of the factors that make students find it complicated in speaking or giving a presentation is anxiety. As experiencing anxiety, most of students face several issues while speaking such as nervousness, trembling, panic, pounding, and sweating. Those several issues can hinder the students from doing their best in speaking or giving presentations. Therefore, the researcher decided to conduct research with the goal to know the level and type of anxiety faced by sophomores and juniors as well as comparing the students' level of anxiety based on the student's academic level. 

A quantitative approach was used as the design of this study. The population was English third and fifth-semester students at the University of Islam Malang. The 60 students participated in this study with equal number 30 students of sophomores and juniors who had already filled out the questionnaire. The instruments were the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS) questionnaire, which was used to examine the type as well as the level of anxiety score, which was used to know the comparison between sophomores' and juniors' anxiety levels. The techniques of this research were the researcher asked the participants to be part of this research. Then, the researcher asked the participants to fill in the questionnaire online that has been provided. To analyze the data, the researcher used Descriptive Statistics and an independent sample T-test on IBM SPSS version 20.

The result of the study showed that the levels of anxiety of sophomores and juniors were at a moderate level of anxiety with the mean score of sophomores (M=117.70) and juniors (107.10). It was also shown that the type of sophomores' anxiety was mostly communication apprehension (M= 37.20), followed by fear of negative evaluation (M= 26.53) and test anxiety (M= 24.00). While juniors mostly faced anxiety type of test anxiety (M =45.17), followed by communication apprehension (M= 35.60) and fear of negative evaluation (M= 23.43). Furthermore, this study also proved that there was a significant difference between the students' speaking anxiety levels across the academic level in online learning during covid 19 with a significance of 0.001 which is less than 0.05 and the mean difference between speaking anxiety level of sophomores and juniors was at 10.6. 

Based on the findings of the study, it is important for the lecturers to take action in class to get rid of students' anxiety. Also, it is needed to further researchers can examine deeply the study related to speaking anxiety between academic levels.

KEYWORD: SPEAKING ANXIETY, FOREIGN LANGUAGE ANXIETY, ACADEMIC LEVEL, ONLINE LEARNING; COVID 19


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References


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