Students’ Anxiety in the Speaking Class and its Consequences
toward their Speaking Achievement
(A Case Study of the Eighth Grade Students
of Bilingual Program at SMP Islam Al Azhar 21 Solo Baru)
Teaching Speaking in ELT (English Language Teaching) is seem to be importance
since speaking is being fundamental skill to human communication. However, the EFL
students often just keep silent in the Speaking English Classroom. Students might have
so many ideas to convey but they often get difficulty in uttering or saying what they
suppose to say. This case related to the students’ anxiety. Students with high level of
anxiety tend to have difficulty in oral performance since they cannot control themselves.
Therefore, the objectives of this study are to explore and describe the problems that are
encountered by the students in learning a foreign language which is known as speaking
anxiety. This study also to recognize students’ strategies to cope with speaking anxiety.
This research was conducted in a bilingual class at SMP Islam Al Azhar 21 Solo Baru
from January 2014 to July 2014 through a qualitative case study approach. The
researcher used purposive sampling in selecting the participants of this research. All the
nineteen students in this bilingual class participanted for answering the questionnaires.
In order to have a further understanding of the students’ foreign language anxiety, some
students were selected as the interviewees according to their scores in the
questionnaires. In addition, the English teacher was interviewed, too. In this study,
questionnaires, interviews, classroom observations, and document collection were
applied as instruments. In analyzing the data, the interactive model of data analysis
proposed by Miles M.B and Huberman A.M (1984) was used.
The study revealed that; (1) anxiety was experienced by a considerable number of
students when speaking English in class, (2) the students reported to be the most
anxious when they have speaking test, (3) the causes of students speaking anxiety were
the learners’ characteristics and the classroom procedures, (4) the psycholinguistic
symptoms often occurred to the students in bilingual program when they were suffering
from speaking anxiety, (5) speaking anxiety has a significant impact to students’
speaking achievement (6) the students reported that they used preparation as the
behavioral strategies to cope with anxiety, (7) the teacher maintaned a close relationship
with the students and also used both English and Indonesia in teaching learning process
to cope with students’ speaking anxiety.
On the whole, it is necessary for both English teacher and students to be aware that
anxiety is a serious issue for EFL students and that a multiple of variables contributes to
it in language classrooms. More importantly, they should realize the urgent need to
search for strategies to help students reduce or even eliminate anxiety when speaking
English in class.
Keywords: speaking anxiety, speaking achievement, bilingual student