An Analysis On Students’ Speaking Anxiety In English Language Education Department At Universitas Islam Riau

Speaking anxiety is about the feeling of nervousness, afraid, uncomfortable, not confidence, and worry when someone does speaking in the target language in front of the audience. The foreign language learners commonly experience it. According to the phenomenon, there are so many researches about anxiety to find a way in controlling the feeling of anxiety. This research explained about analysis of the students speaking anxiety. It conducted using descriptive qualitative research. The research participants were 30 students of the fourth semester in English Language Education of FKIP UIR. This research investigated the levels of students’ anxiety and the dominant type of speaking anxiety experienced by the learners. In conducting the research, the researcher was gain the data through Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (design by Horwitz et al., 1986) and an close-ended questionnaire. The study’s findings revealed that the students experienced speaking anxiety during the class activities. It found that most of the students experienced a moderate level of speaking anxiety (70%). Besides, there were eight low anxiety students (27%), and 1 student who had a high anxiety level (3%). The most dominant aspect of students’ speaking anxiety was communication apprehension (47%), followed by fear of negative evaluation (29%), and low self-confidence (19.3%). Those levels and aspects of speaking anxiety were affected by 5 causes, namely students’ belief about speaking, students’ speaking activity impression, incomprehensible of speaking components, lack of preparation, perception of negative evaluation by the classmate and lecturer. The finding showed that anxiety affects students’ performance in a speaking activity. Applying positive thinking and learning more seriously followed by practicing a lot also prepare the subject before come to the class are needed to help in solving the students' anxiety