EFL student's anxiety in speaking English from ecological perspective: Factors and strategies

Anxiety in speaking English is a substantial emotional response to foreign language acquisition. Foreign language acquisition is the process of learning a non-native language outside the context in which it is commonly spoken. Thus, anxiety might occur during learning the language. For those reasons, this case study firstly aims to explore detailed factors in speaking anxiety from an ecological perspective using the nested ecosystems model. Secondly, it investigates the strategies students use to cope with anxiety in speaking English. This study recruited the 2nd-semester students of the English Education Department at UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung. Purposive sampling and classroom observation were used to choose the participants. Four students were chosen as participants from twenty-four EFL students based on their anxiety levels. This study obtained research data from an in-depth interview to explore the factor that causes anxiety in speaking English and investigate EFL students' strategies to overcome their apprehension about speaking English as the target language. Based on the nested ecosystems model (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), students' speaking anxiety was identified foremost at the microsystem level. The rest three ecosystems: meso-, exo-, and macrosystems, appeared afterward. Furthermore, the research results showed that students utilize strategies to cope with the unease before, during, and after encountering anxiety in speaking. This study recommends that teachers might consider the factors that cause anxiety in speaking to develop and innovate the approach for teaching English to EFL