VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
HOÀNG THỊ HUYỀN
A STUDY ON ANXIETY IN SPEAKING CLASS OF THE 1
ST
YEAR NON-
ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF
EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY

( NGHIªN CỨU VỀ SỰ LO LẮNG TRONG LỚP HỌC NãI TIẾNG ANH
CỦA SINH VIªN KH«NG CHUYªN NĂM THỨ NHẤT TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC
SƯ PHẠM KỸ THUẬT HƯNG YªN)

M.A. Minor Programme Thesis

Field
: English Methodology

ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT HUNG YEN UNIVERSITY OF
EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY

( NGHIªN CỨU VỀ SỰ LO LẮNG TRONG LỚP HỌC NãI TIẾNG ANH
CỦA SINH VIªN KH«NG CHUYªN NĂM THỨ NHẤT TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC
SƯ PHẠM KỸ THUẬT HƯNG YªN)

M.A. Minor Programme Thesis

Field
: English Methodology
Code
: 601410
Supervisor
: PH¹M THÞ H¹NH, M.A Hanoi, 2010

Semi-structured interview……………………………………………………………… .17
CHAPTER III: DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS……………………………………… 19
1. Level of speaking anxiety experinced by UTEHY non- English major freshmen …… 19
Communication anxiety……………………………………………………………… 19
Fear of negative evaluation…………………………………………………………… . 21

v
Test anxiety………………………………………………………………………… 23
2. Sources of students’ speaking anxiety………………………………………………… . 23
Subjective factors……………………………………………………………………… .24
Objective factors……………………………………………………………………… . 27
CHAPTER IV: SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS………………………………………… 30
1. Recommendations for the teachers……………………………………………………… 30
2. Recommendations for the students……………………………………………………… 32
PART THREE: CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………35
1. Summary of the study……………………………………………………………………35
2. Limitations of the study………………………………………………………………… 35
3. Recommendations for further research………………………………………………… 36
REFERENCES I
APPENDIXES………………………………………………………………………………… III


vii
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Criteria to identify groups of FLA levels
Table 2: Level of speaking anxiety experinced by UTEHY non- English major freshmen
Table 3:Level of communication anxiety experinced by UTEHY non- English major
freshmen
Table 4: : Level of fear of negative evaluation experinced by UTEHY non- English major
freshmen
Table 5: Level of test anxiety experinced by UTEHY non- English major freshmen
2. Aims and objectives of the study:

2

The study is aimed at anxieties encountered by the first year non English major students in
Economic Department, Hung Yen University of Technology and Education, and then finding
some possible techniques for dealing with students’ anxiety in speaking class. To help the
students overcome such difficulties, the specific objectives of the study are:
- to identify the anxiety and point out factors affecting students’ anxiety in learning
speaking skill
- to suggest some realistic and appropriate pedagogical implications to improve students’
ability to cope with anxiety in learning speaking skill.

3. Scope of the study:

There are many types of anxiety. However, this study only focuses on anxiety of speaking
skill for the First Year Non English majors at Hung Yen University of Technology and
Education. This study is claimed to be an overview of current situations of the first year non
English majors when learning speaking skill and some suggestions for students to cope with
anxiety in speaking class as well as techniques for the teachers to improve their teaching
methods of speaking skills.

4. Methods of the study:

The study will be conducted using quantitative and qualitative methods with questionnaires
for informants of one class of about 30 first- year non majors of English and 15 teachers at the
University of Technology and Education in Hung Yen- Department of foreign languages. In
addition to the questionnaire, informal interviews with the informants and their teachers and
personal observation will also be employed.



Part C, conclusion, summarizes all the key issues as well as the limitations of the study and
suggestions for further study.

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PART TWO- THE STUDY
CHAPTER I- LITERATURE REVIEW

1. Theoretical background of anxiety:

1.1. Definition of anxiety:

There has been a variety of studies carried out on anxiety. Anxiety is “the subjective feeling of
tension, comprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of autonomic
nervous system” (Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope, 1986, p.125). Or “the worry and negative
emotional reaction aroused when learning a second language” (MacIntyre, 1999, p.27).
Second language anxiety is defined here a distinct complex of self- perception, beliefs,
feelings, and behaviors related to using a foreign/ second language for communication beyond
class language.

They identified three related anxieties as components of foreign language anxiety:
communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation.

In addition “Anxiety is a psychological construct, commonly described by psychologists as a
state of apprehension, a vague fear that is only indirectly associated with an object” (Hilgard,
Atkinson, & Atkinson, 1971 cited in Scovel, 1991:18).

Anxiety, as perceived intuitively by many language learners, negatively influences language
learning and has been found to be one of the most highly examined variables in all of

facilitating – a positive factor assisting people towards success – and debilitating – a
negative factor, blocking or preventing people from success.
5. Speaking in the foreign / second language has been cited in the literature as the greatest
source of anxiety, followed by listening, as opposed to reading and writing.
6. Anxiety, in general, can have physical, emotional, and behavioral
manifestations and these manifestations can differ with each individual.

6
In addition to these types of foreign language anxiety above, there is a version of Foreign
Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) that was designed by Horwitz (1986) to
measure the level of foreign language anxiety in class. This questionnaire consists of 33
statements, of which 8 items were for communication anxiety (1, 9, 14, 18, 24, 27, 29, 32), 9
items for fear of negative evaluation (3, 7, 13, 15, 20, 23, 25, 31, 33) and 5 items for test
anxiety (2, 8, 10, 19, 21). As for the remaining 11 items, they were put in a group which was
named anxiety of English classes. The respondents were asked to rate each item on a five-
point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“strong disagreement”) to 5 (“strong agreement”). The
higher the score, the higher the anxiety level. And this is claimed to be the theoretical
background for all the findings of the research. 1. 4. Sources of foreign language anxiety:

As cited in Young, 1992; Crookall and Oxford, 1991;Horwitz and Young, 1991; Price,
1991; McCoy 1979, there are a variety of views and suggestions put forth concerning the
causes of foreign language anxiety as follow:
 Inability to learn another language
 Inability to pronounce strange sounds and words
 Not knowing the meaning of words and sentences
 Inability to understand and answer questions in the new language
 The reputation of language classes for failure and poor grades

Learners’ preferences for learning will influence the kinds of strategies they choose to learn
new materials.

Learners’ attitudes: Learners’ attitudes may involve the attitudes towards the target language;
the people in the community speaking that language, the language teacher, the foreign
language course. For example, if the learners have the favorable attitude toward native
speakers of the language and have a hope of contacting with them, they will be motivated to
learn that language.

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Learners’ beliefs: According to Ellis.R (1994) learners’ beliefs are usually based on previous
learning experiences and they are also likely influenced by general factors such as personality
and cognitive styles. Learners have their own strong beliefs in the way to learn the language
and achieve target language successfully. For instance, some students think learning in a
natural way by practicing, trying to think in English or living and studying in an environment
where English is spoken is the best way, while some believe they should learn about the
language like vocabulary, grammar, etc. Therefore, students’ beliefs decide their ways and
goals of learning.

Learners’ intelligence and ability: refer to the abilities or innate factors. It consists of
students’ ability to identify and memorize new sounds, words and structures; ability to
understand the function of particular words and grammatical rules, especially in speaking
skill- it is ability to speak with accuracy and fluency.

1.4.2. Objective factors:

Objective factors involve factors relating to the teachers and learning conditions.

Teachers: According to Dornyei (2001), teachers’ appropriate behaviors, enthusiasms,

(1985) once held in his affective filter hypothesis that high anxiety will prevent input that
learners receive in the classroom from reaching the language acquisition device. Horwitz
(1986) also asserted that language anxiety can cause students to postpone language study
indefinitely or to change majors. MacIntyre and Gardner (1994), based on a study of 97
college students that learn French, concluded that compared with more relaxed learners, those
with anxiety find it more difficult to express their own views and tend to underestimate their
own abilities. They also found that in the three stages of language acquisition, that is, input,
processing and output, anxiety and learning achievement are negatively correlated. Moreover,
there have also been some studies conducted to find the negative correlation between anxiety

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and four aspects of language learning, especially speaking and listening. For example,
MacIntyre and Gardner (1991) found that speaking is by far the main agent of anxiety-arousal,
and that students with high anxiety perform worse than those with low anxiety.

Bailey (1983) attributed the cause of FLA to competitiveness by analyzing diaries of 11
learners and finding that they tended to become anxious when comparing with the other
learners who were more proficient, those who in turn perceived themselves more confident
and therefore better able to compete and reduce their nervousness.

Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986) stated that anxious students often cite speaking in the
foreign language learning to be their most anxiety –producing experience. They are put in a
position of communicating with someone without having sufficient command of the language
to do so.
1.6. Components of foreign language anxiety:

1.6.1. Communication apprehension

Communication apprehension, which generally refers to a type of anxiety experienced in
interpersonal communicative settings (McCroskey, 1987), is obviously quite relevant to

language classroom may not always correspond to the individually different needs or
expectations that the students would hold toward their teachers.

1.6.3. Test anxiety:

With respect to test anxiety, many of the learners feel more pressure when asked to perform in
second language classroom, because they are doubly challenged by the fact that they need to
recall and coordinate grammar points at the same time during the limited test period. As a
result, they may put down the wrong answers or simple “freeze up” due to nervousness, even
if they know the correct answer (Price, 1991; McIntyre & Gardner, 1994).

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Test anxiety as explained by Horwitz et al (1986) “refer to a type of performance anxiety
stemming from a fear of failure”. Test anxiety is a quite pervasive phenomenon in the
language classroom, especially among highly anxious students because of the continual
evaluation from the language teachers. Moreover, it is obvious that oral testing which is
widely applied in almost universities can provoke potentially both test and communication
anxiety simultaneously in susceptible students.

2. Theoretical background of speaking activities:

2.1. Concepts of speaking activities:
Speaking activities are said to be a priority for most of the second language learners. The
ability to communicate in foreign language fluently and effectively contribites to the success
of learners in school and in every stage of their lives. Learners often evaluate their
effectiveness and proficiency of second language learning based on how well they have
improved in their speaking skill. In school, this skill is paid much attention by the teachers via
their design of speaking activities on oral presentation, working in groups/ pairs, role- play and
so on to get the engagement of students and to improve students’ ability to speak.


the language.

This paper attempts to further explore the identification of foreign language anxiety as well as
the factors affecting foreign language anxiety in speaking skill as a conceptually distinct
variable in foreign language learning in a certain setting of one improvement class in their
third semester of Economics Department at UTEHY. The symptoms and consequences as well
as the ways to reduce students’ anxiety will thus be taken into consideration to those
concerned with language learning and teaching.

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CHAPTER II- METHODOLOGY

1. The context:

The study was conducted at UTEHY. All students at this university are required to complete
three semesters of English as part of their general education requirements. In these three
semesters, students finish the General English program, which accounts for nine credits.

There are two main streams at UTEHY: English for Economics and English for Technics. The
former follows a curriculum which provides students with the improvement of the all four
macro- skills including speaking, listening, writing and reading and lays greater emphasis on
oral communication- that is listening and speaking skill. Their textbook is Market Leader from
Elementary to Intermediate, while the latter uses the curriculum which focuses mainly on
developing reading and listening skills. Their textbook is TOEIC and it also ranges from Very
Easy TOEIC to Developing TOEIC according to the difficulty level. The total time allocation
for both per semester is 66 class periods ( 45 munites each). However, the students of the
former is considered to be better at English than the latter as English is their major subject at

experience, the last nine aged from 24- 28 with at least two years of teaching experience.
To design the questions in the questionnaire and make them valid, a pilot was done before
with the participation of all 15 teachers and after collecting their contributive ideas, the final
one was made (appendix 2) with 9 questions totally in the light of gaining the information of
their teaching experiences about students’ speaking anxiety, how to deal with and how to
motivate students in speaking class.

3. The instruments:

In the first phase, questionnaires were administered to 30 UTEHY freshmen and 15 teachers
of the English Department at the end of the second semester of the academic year 2009- 2010.
The students were asked to complete the questionnaires at home and returned their responses
two days later so that they would have as much time as they needed. The teachers were asked

16
to complete the questionnaires any time and all of them did it in only 20 munites since they
experience this type of anxiety very well.

After the data collected were analyzed, in the second phase, 5 highly anxious students were
contacted for semi- structured interviews with the researcher in locations they felt at ease and
at time they suggested.

3.1. Survey questionnaires:

The first data collection instrument is quantitative questionnaire (appendix 1 and 2) which
served three main purposes: 1) to ascertain if the students under investigation experienced
speaking anxiety; 2) to get the teachers’ experiences of students’ matter of anxiety and their
reccommendations for reducing students’ anxiety and 3) to identify the participants for the
follow- up interview in phase two. Both questionnaire were designed to consist of two parts.
Part one is obtaining some general information of the subjects including their name, age, their

A
x ≥ 72
H 3.2. Semi-structured interview:

The second research tool in this study was semi-structured interview (appendix 3). 10 items
for the interview had been prepared in advance in light of finding out the factors affecting
anxiety in foreign lanuage learning (section 1.4). These questions are open enough to allow the
interviewee to freely express their own ideas, thoughts and feelings.
Regarding to the structure designed, there are three parts of the interview. For the first part, 3
general questions relating to the subjects’ experience of anxiety were built. The purposes of
this part were two fold: to establish a rapport with the interviewees and to make sure again
they had ever experienced the feelings of anxiety before. The second part with 7 questions
focuses on the factors of anxiety in speaking classes. Specifically, to explore source of anxiety
associated with the subjective factors, questions 4 and 5 were edited. Questions 6, 7, 8 and 9
attempt to explore the source of anxiety associated with the objective factors Finally, to get

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recommendations for alleviating speaking anxiety concerning both sides of teachers and
students, question 10 is designed.

The interviews were tape-recorded to free the interviewer to participate naturally in the
discussion and to allow the content to be reviewed in details. In addition, in order to capture
the complexities of the respondent’s individual perceptions and experience, the five interviews
were conducted in Vietnamese. At the beginning of the interview, the students were explained
clearly about the nature of the study. During the interview, the researcher modified the
questions and procedures according to the subjects’ responses. The length of each interview
was 25- 30 minutes.

Speaking anxiety
In UTEHY non- English
major freshmen
Total score
98
Average
3.27

From table 2, the data shows that the average level of anxiety reported by the participants was
3.27, which was higher than the mid- point of 3 of the five- point Likert scale ( 3 points-
section 3.1). In addition, out of 30 participants, the number of students whose speaking anxiety
score reported was higher than the average (3 points x 18 items = 54) was calculated at 20 (
appendix 5). These suggest that speaking anxiety does exist clearly among the students
surveyed in the study.
Furthermore, to get more insights into the degree to which the participants felt anxious in
English speaking classes, the questionnaire items were analyzed to explore the three possible
causes of learning anxiety, which will be presented below:

1.1. Communication anxiety:

As being noted in section 3.1, items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 were designed to measure the level
of communication anxiety. Responses to these items are presented in table 3.