The Correlation between Students’ Foreign Language Anxiety and Their Speaking Performance at Speaking Class

Abstract

Anxiety is a feeling of fear, nervousness, worry, and confusion. It may become intern factor that influences students in learning. While foreign language anxiety is when someone feels confused, scared, loses confidence in learning a language. Foreign language anxiety is one of several factors that influence English students’ performance, especially in speaking. This situation can lead fear of speaking and make students passive in classroom. Speaking is important skill to deliver ideas, thoughts, and opinions, so it is not demanding that college students face FLA during speaking class since speaking is close to communication. This study was aimed to know whether there is a correlation between students’ foreign language anxiety and their speaking performance at speaking class of forth semester students of English Department in UNISMA. For research design, this study used a correlational quantitative research method. In this research, 42 students were selected to be participants by using stratified sampling method from forth semester students who took speaking 4 class. The procedure of the research involved two steps; administering a questionnaire and taking document of students’ midterm test score from the lectures. To analyze the data, the researcher used SPSS version 20. The finding of this study indicated there was a low correlation between students’ foreign language anxiety and their speaking performance with the correlation coefficient equaled r= .361 which resided between .20 - .40. Then the level of probability (p) significance (sig.2-tailed) was .019. it means that p (.019) was lower than .05. In addition, the finding also showed 17 (40.5 %) students had low anxiety, 24 (57.1 %) students had moderate anxiety, and one (2.4 %) student had high anxiety. Based on the finding of this study, it is addressed to English lecturers to be aware to their students and create more suitable strategy in learning activities to minimize students FLA. It is also suggested for the students, they have to be aware and explore themselves in certain learning so that they can find suitable way to perform speaking well and manage or push down their anxious feeling. For further research, it is suggested to take larger number and different level of participants and conducting speaking test orally to the participant to collect the data. Key Words: Foreign Language Anxiety, Speaking