An Investigation of FL Speaking Anxiety and Its contributing Factors: The Case of Grade Ten Students

Abstract

It has been reported that the learners in foreign language classes suffer from considerable levels of anxiety because they are faced with the challenge of handling the contents in the medium of the target language they are not very much familiar with. While interacting with their teachers, class fellows and even the textbooks, the students are challenged with different social and psychological factors those create anxiety in EFL learners that make their objective of achieving proficiency in the target language rather difficult. This study attempted to identify learners’ level of anxiety and its causes by administering FLCAS (Horwitz et al.1986) to randomly-selected 180 high school students in Dembi, Chello and Yembero enrolled 2017/2018. The researcher carried out the study by administering FLCAS (Horwitz et al. 1986) to the above number of students and by conducting semi-structured interviews with three teachers. The findings from FLCAS and semi-structured interviews showed that the students felt anxious of making mistakes and about teachers’ correcting their mistakes in the classes; they felt nervousness about failing the exams. Again, the poor return rate of the FLCAS also shows the students’ feeling anxiety regarding foreign language. The results indicated that FL speaking anxiety comes from setting, performance, linguistic knowledge and non-systematic error corrections and psycho-social reasons. The researcher recommends that language teachers should adopt purely learners-centered teaching methods. A low anxiety and supportive learning environment should be created inside the classrooms.