Exploring English Speaking Anxiety Among Filipino Engineering Students: Its Influence on Task Performance and Its Sources

Abstract

The need for effective English speaking skills in engineering fields compels schools to innovate curricula that shall address the language skills of a 'global engineer.' The impact of engineering curricular reforms trickled down among students who contend with language learning anxiety, besides anxiety from mathematics and other technical courses. In this paper, the researchers explored English speaking anxiety among 162 engineering students in an engineering University in Manila, Philippines. A mixed-method, explanatory sequential design was used. This method combines the quantitative and qualitative approaches in investigating the phenomenon under study, i.e., English speaking anxiety. In the quantitative phase, the researchers used data from the speaking component of a self-developed scale and speaking performance scores yielded from an interactive English conversation task. Analysis revealed a significant negative relationship between speaking anxiety and speaking task performance, pointing to the debilitative influence of anxiety on task performance. In the qualitative phase, semi-structured interviews among nine purposefully selected students revealed that both peers and teachers were common sources of speaking anxiety and in a variety of ways. The findings point to speaking anxiety as an important psycho-and sociolinguistic phenomenon, which is hinged on the specific roles that language teaching and learning plays in preparing engineering students as future language consumers and users in highly technical, specialized, and competitive engineering fields.

Public Speaking Anxiety in Oral Presentation Class among Undergraduates

“…Surprisingly, studies by Quinto & Macayan (2019) and Sutarsyah (2017) show a significant negative correlation between speaking anxiety and learners' performance.…”

Fear of Learning Foreign Languages: A Study Across Disciplines

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Evaluating English Teachers’ Pronunciation Skills (E-TPS) Using Praat Technology and Human Raters

“…This is not only students practising speaking through engaging classroom activities, but also their learning about the nature of speaking in a second language and ways to manage speaking development (Chong et al, 2022;Darmi et al, 2018;P. S. C. Goh, 2019;Huang & Hashim, 2020;Quinto & Macayan, 2019). In the same sense, it involves principles and experience in creating and implementing approaches such as direct/controlled and indirect/transfer approaches respectively (Burns, 1998;C.…”