A Correlation between Students’ Anxiety Levels and Oral Presentation Performance in EFL Speaking Class

Abstract

This research was aimed to find out whether there is a correlation between students’ anxiety level and oral presentation’s performance in EFL speaking class. The population of this research was the 4th semester students in English Education Study Program of Bengkulu University class A, B and C with 51 students randomly chosen as the sample. The design of this research was descriptive quantitative with questionnaire and presentation test as the instruments. The questionnaire of this research was FLCAS (Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scales) by Horwitz (1986) meanwhile the presentation test was a presentation test rubric evaluated by two raters in order to find the reliability of the test. The result of this research showed that there was a significant negative correlation between students’ anxiety level and oral presentation test score from rater 1 and rater 2. Based on the result, the strength of this correlation was moderate. On the other hand, both of the results were in negative directions. The finding also showed that most of the students had “Mildly Anxious” level of anxiety and “Basic” category from presentation test score. It can be concluded that anxiety can influenced the students’ speaking skill especially while performing a presentation in front of the class. Some factors as like fear of making mistakes, being seen by a lot of people, or being interrupted by the lecturers can increase the students’ anxiety. Keywords : Anxiety Levels, Oral Presentation, Speaking.

Developing Students’ Speaking Skills through Flipped Classroom Model

“…However, speaking English is still quite challenging for EFL learners because a good oral communication also needs the speakers' ability to use the language properly (Marzban & Hashemi, 2013). As a foreign language which is not applied in daily conversation, the students are often feel anxious when the teacher asked them to speak in front of the class (Amini et al, 2019). As quoted by Yen, Hou, & Chang (2015), the students' ability in speaking English is based on people around them because speaking English in public around some Asians will be more stressful because the speaker will be nervous when people around them are staring at them.…”

Self-Efficacy, Anxiety, and Emotional Intelligence: Do They Contribute to Speaking Performance?

“…Students' physical and emotional well-being are both impacted by the effects of speaking anxiety (Susanto, 2017;Tyana, 2021). It was demonstrated by the study's findings which indicated that students with lower levels of anxiety perform better when speaking than those with higher levels of nervousness (Amini, 2019).…”

“…Student behavior is influenced by the student's own anxiety, the more they have high anxiety the more it can affect their performance in front of the class. Horwitz cited in Amini et al, (2019) stated that anxiety has a negative impact, which will prevent students from receiving language input. And then their mastery of the language will fail to make progress.…”

Enjoyment and Self-Efficacy in Oral Scientific Communication Are Positively Correlated to Postsecondary Students’ Oral Performance Skills

“…The fact that the correlations are not statistically significant might indicate that anxious students can still perform well despite their anxiety. It has been documented that anxiety from speaking in front of a class might be linked to lack of performance [40,95,96]. However, as mentioned by Bodie [40], only students with high public speaking anxiety sometimes demonstrate speaking styles that negatively impacted their performance (for instance, 'confrontation style' and 'inflexible style').…”