VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
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TRẦN THỊ PHƯƠNG

AN INVESTIGATION INTO SPEAKING-IN-CLASS ANXIETY
OF ENGLISH-MAJORED STUDENTS: THE CASE OF THE
SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS AT THE SCHOOL OF FOREIGN
LANGUAGES, THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY

Nghiên cứu sự lo lắng khi nói tiếng Anh trong lớp học của
sinh viên chuyên Anh: Trường hợp sinh viên năm thứ hai tại
khoa Ngoại Ngữ, Đại học Thái Nguyên

M.A MAJOR PROGRAMME THESIS

FIELD: ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY
CODE : 60140111

Hanoi, 2016


VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
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TRẦN THỊ PHƯƠNG


Hanoi, December 2016
Signature

Tran Thi Phuong

i


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe many great thanks to so many people who have supported me all
the way throughout my study to this final achievement.
First of all, I would like to express my special thank to my supervisor,
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Phuong Nga, for her wholehearted guidance,
valuable suggestions and academic advice during the course of writing this
thesis, without which this work would hardly have been accomplished.
I would also like to send my sincere thanks to all lecturers at PostGraduate Studies Department, ULIS – VNU who gave me interesting lessons
and comprehensive knowledge.
I also wish to send my deep appreciation to my colleagues and students
at English Department, School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen
University who have encouraged me and helped me with the research data.
Last, to my family, words are not enough to express my gratitude. I am
grateful to my parents, my husband, my little daughter. Without their help and
encouragement, I could not have completed this study.

Hanoi, December 2016
Signature

Tran Thi Phuong



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Regarding the teachers‟ behaviors and characteristics, the findings
showed that the students would feel less anxious if the teacher is patient and
friendly, has a sense of humor, makes students feel comfortable. In addition,
teachers‟ appropriate teaching practices on class management and error
correction are reported to effectively reduce student‟s anxiety and so create a
comfortable learning atmosphere in classroom.
Finally, the pedagogical implications of these findings for understanding
second/foreign language anxiety for enhancing learners‟ communication
abilities in the target langage were discussed, as are suggestions for future
research.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION ........................................................................................... i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................... ii
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................. v
LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................... vii
LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................. viii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................... ix
PART A: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 1
1. Rationale of the study ................................................................................. 1
2. Aims and objectives of the study ............................................................... 3
3. Scope of the study ...................................................................................... 3

3.1.1. Overall of students‟ responses to in-class speaking anxiety ................ 43
3.1.2. In-class speaking anxiety categories ................................................... 50
3.2. Anxiety towards in-class activities ........................................................ 58
3.3. Teachers‟ characteristics and techniques related to anxiety reduction .... 64
PART C: CONCLUSION .......................................................................... 69
1. Summary of the research findings ............................................................ 69
2. Implications .............................................................................................. 70
3. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research ................... 71
REFERENCES ........................................................................................... 73
APPENDIX .................................................................................................... I

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LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1 Students‟ responses to ICESA scale.............................................. 43
Table 3.2 Students‟ level of in-class speaking anxiety .................................. 48
Table 3.3 Top causes of in-class speaking anxiety ........................................ 49
Table 3.4 Students‟ fear of negative evaluation ............................................ 51
Table 3.5 Students‟ communication apprehension ........................................ 52
Table 3.6 Students‟ test anxiety .................................................................... 56
Table 3.7 In-class speaking activities ........................................................... 58
Table 3.8 In-class speaking activities with high anxiety ............................... 62
Table 3.9 In-class speaking activities with low anxiety ................................ 63
Table 3.10 Students‟ perceptions of teachers‟ behaviors and characteristics . 65

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LIST OF FIGURES


In-Class English Speaking Anxiety

L1:

First Language

L2:

Second Language

SFL:

School of Foreign Languages

TA:

Test Anxiety

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PART A: INTRODUCTION
The first chapter presents the rationale for the study. Following this, the
aim and objectives of the study, the research questions, the scope,
significance and methods of the study are presented. The chapter ends with
an overview of the thesis structure.
1. Rationale of the study
Foreign language anxiety is one of the important barriers which may
cause various difficulties for the language learners. This problem limits

2011; Ozturk & Gurbuz, 2014; Salem & Dyiar, 2014). However, contrary to
what is happening abroad, fewer studies in Vietnam have been conducted
and acknowledged the effects of anxiety on foreign language learning. Only
some empirical studies have touched on the sources of anxiety (Tran et al.,
2013, Nguyen, 2014), and none of them has focused on the English-majored
students of Thai Nguyen university. Obviously, as a teacher at Thai Nguyen
University, the researcher observes that students who are majoring in English
usually experience the feelings of frustration, pressure, and nervousness
during some English classes. Most of them are reluctant to participate in
classroom tasks, especially in English speaking activities.
All of above issues have strongly aroused the researcher‟s interest and
motivated her to conduct the research entitled “An investigation into
speaking-in-class anxiety of English-majored students: The case of the
second-year students at the School of Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen
university”.

2


2. Aims and objectives of the study
The present study aims to investigate speaking-in-class anxiety with the
main focus on the second-year English-majored students at the School of
Foreign Languages, Thai Nguyen university.
The specific objectives of the present study are:
- To examine the levels of speaking-in-class anxiety experienced by the
second-year English-majored students at School of Foreign Languages, Thai
Nguyen University.
- To investigate the types of in-class activities which cause the most
anxiety to students and which reduce students‟ anxiety.
- To suggest what teachers‟ behaviors and characteristics can reduce

In addition, the fingdings from this study will shed a light on the utility
of language learning activities in the foreign language classroom, helping
teachers in providing comfortable and supportive environments for their
students where they are able to succeed as language learners.
5. Methodology
In order to answer three research questions, the study involved mainly
quantitative methodology; specifically, the author conducted survey
questionnaires in which different parts will aim at answering the three
research questions. The survey was conducted on the population of the
second-year English-majored students at the School of Foreign Languages,
Thai Nguyen university. The detail of the methodology applied in the study
is discussed in Chapter 2 of Part B.
6. Design of the study
This research consists of three main parts:
- PART A, INTRODUCTION, gives a brief overview of the study
including the rationale, aims and objectives, research methodology, scope,
significance and design of the study.

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- PART B, DEVELOPMENT, is sub-divided into three chapters.
Chapter 1, Literature Review, presents the review of literature and a critical
analysis on the previous researches in the same field. Chapter 2, Research
Methodology, disccuses the methodology used in the study including the
context of the study, the population information, instrumentation, data
collection procedure and data analysis. Chapter 3, Results and Discussion,
reports an analysis of the data and presentation of the findings.
- PART C, CONCLUSION, records a summary of the findings, a
conclusion, implications for practice, limitations of the study followed by

terror”.
Freud (1895, cited in Spielberger and Rickman, 1990:74) describes
anxiety as “something felt” – an unpleasant affective (emotional) state or
condition that was characterized by subjective feelings of chronic
apprehesion and “all that is covered by the word „nervousness‟. Similarly,
Calvin (1955) defines anxiety as a painful emotional experience which is
produced by excitations in the internal organs of the body. These excitations
results from internal or external stimulation and are governed by the
autonmic nervous system. Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope (1986) give another

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definition of anxiety which is “the subjective feeling of tension,
apprehension, nervousness, and worry associated with an arousal of
autonomic nervous system” (p.125).
Spielberger & Rickman, in Anxiety and the Heart (1990) also refers
anxiety as an unpleasant feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness, and
worry, and activation of the autonomic nervous system. According to them,
the physiological manifestations in anxiety generally include increased blood
pressure; rapid heart rate; sweating; dryness of the mouth; nausea; vertigo
(diziness); irregularities in breathing; muscle tension; and muscular-skeletal
disturbances such as restless, tremors, and feelings of weakness.
Clearly, even though we all know what anxiety is and we all have
experienced feelings of anxiousness, anxiety is still not easy to be defined in
a simple sentence or in a single manner. Therefore, Rachman (2004), a
clinical psychologist, presents one of the most complete and useful
descriptions of anxiety. According to Rachman (2004:3), anxiety is the tense,
unsettling anticipation of a threat, a feeling of suspended uneasiness. It is
clearly distinguished from fear in terms of its “causes, duration, and

A strong correlation between state and trait anxiety has been claimed
in the literature, which means that people having trait anxiety are more likely
to have state anxiety (Aydin, 2001). Particularly, individuals with high levels
of trait anxiety are expected to show greater evaluations of state anxiety in
stressful situations. However, MacIntyre and Gardner (1991c) stated that
people who have the same trait anxiety scores may react differently in
different situations. In their study, for example, two subjects having the same
trait anxiety scores were compared in terms of their responses to the social
situations given in the subscales of the fictitious trait anxiety scale. The
situations were written tests or exams, novel situations and dangerous
circumstances. It was found that the first subject did not feel anxious in
written exams, but felt nervous in social situations. In contrast, the second

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subject felt anxious in written exams but did not feel anxious in social
situations. For novel and dangerous situations, they had the same score.
Another distinction is made between two other types of anxiety:
facilitating and debilitating anxiety. These types of anxiety refer to the
effects that anxiety has on learning process, showing whether anxiety
improves or impairs performance.
Facilitating anxiety, first proposed by Alpert and Haber (1960, cited in
Sellers, 2000), is stated to influence the learner in a positive, motivating way
and is described as enthusiasm before a challenging task. According to
Scovel (1978), this type of anxiety “motivates the leaner to „fight‟ the new
learning task; it gears the learner emotionally for approach behavior”
(p.136). In addition, Krashen (cited in Young, 1992) believes that facilitative
anxiety has a positive effect on language learning, but only on tasks that
require concious learning, not on language acquisition. Language

1.3.1. Definition of foreign language anxiety
Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope (1986: 128) provided three “useful
conceptual building blocks” for a description of foreign language anxiety;
namely communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test
anxiety. Communication apprehension is characterized as one‟s discomfort
in communicating with others. Fear of negative evaluation is defined as
apprehension about what others will say or feel about one‟s performance.
Finally, test anxiety involves worry over one‟s performance in an evaluative
situation. However, they noticed that foreign language anxiety is not simply
the combination of these fears transferred to foreign language anxiety.
Rather, foreign language anxiety is conceived as “distinct complex of selfconceptions, beliefs, feelings and behavior related to classroom learning
arising from the uniqueness of the language learning process”.

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Moreover, foreign language anxiety, a complex and multidimensional
phenomenon, can also be defined as “the apprehension experienced when a
situation requires the use of a second language with which the individual is
not fully proficient.” (Gardner & MacIntyre, 1993: 5). It is, therefore, seen as
a stable personality trait referring to the tendency for an individual to react in
a nervous manner when speaking, listening, reading, or writing in the second
language.
Sharing the same perspective towards the concept of foreign language
anxiety, Richards and Schmidt (2010: 313) define foreign language anxiety
in the following way:
Foreign language anxiety is a situation – specific anxiety, similar in that
respect to public speaking anxiety. Issues in the study of language anxiety
include whether anxiety is a cause or an effect of poor achievement, anxiety
under specific instructional conditions, and the relationship of general

communicate in a foreign language (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986: 127).
Test anxiety refers to “a type of performance resulting from a fear of
failure” (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986: 127). Test anxiety is also closely
related to the discussion of FLA because “performance evaluation is an
ongoing feature of most foreign language classes” (p.127). Test-anxious
students might suffer quite a number of difficulties in foreign language class
since tests and quizzes are frequent and even the smartest and most prepared
students cannot avoid making errors from time to time. Of all the tests and
quizzes, oral ones are especially anxiety-provoking since anxious students
probably manifest both communication apprehension and test anxiety in this
kind of test (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986).
Finally, fear of negative evaluation is the “apprehension about others‟
evaluations, avoidance of evaluative situations, and the expectation that
others would evaluate oneself negatively” (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986:
128). Although similar to test anxiety, fear of negative evaluation is not

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limited to test-taking situations; rather, it may occur in any social, evaluative
sitations such as inteviewing for a job or speaking in foreign language class”
(Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986). In addition, fear of negative evaluation is
broader in scope than test anxiety in that it pertains both to the teacher‟s
evaluation of the students and to the perceived reaction of other students.
Although three constructs above “provide useful conceptual building
blocks for the description of foreign language anxiety”, Horwitz, Horwitz, &
Cope (1986: 128) propose that FLA is not just the sum of these fears
transferred to FL learning. Rather, they conceive foreign language anxiety as
“a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors
related to classroom language learning arising from the uniqueness of the

foreign or second language at the output stage.
To sum up, the combined effects of language anxiety at all three stages
can explain why the students with lower levels of anxiety, when compared to
high anxious students, tend to learn better.
1.3.2.3. Foss and Reitzel’s model of foreign language anxiety
For conceptualizing how anxiety interferes with the attainment of
competence in second language classrooms, Foss and Reitzel (1988)
proposed a framework of language anxiety. There are five components of
their framework: motivation, knowledge, skills, outcomes and context.
Motivation is associated with the avoidance response to a particular
communcation situation. Specifically, some L2 learners may choose not to
communicate in a situation because they judge their capacities to be so poor.
Knowledge consists of a repertoire of behavioral patterns and strategies
upon which a person draws in order to decide how to communicate in a
given situation. This is done since learning a language may be especially
anxiety producing and gaining the knowledge of a second language might

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