The Repercussion of Foreign Language Anxiety on Students’ Speaking Performance

Abstract

The current study seeks to determine the extent to which foreign language anxiety affects university students’ speaking performance. A secondary research, based on three academic articles on the influence of foreign language anxiety on university students’ speaking performance, has been conducted to achieve this purpose. The studies discussed in the three articles were carried in different geographical contexts. Researchers adopted different research designs; namely, descriptive and correlational. They relied on observations, interviews and questionnaires inspired from the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS) as research instruments to collect data. The findings of the three studies reveal the manifestation of high-level anxiety during students’ speaking performance; additionally, the latter mostly affect their communicative abilities. The comparative study reveals that foreign language anxiety negatively influences university students’ speaking performance in a way that it lowers their self-esteem and motivation in achieving their foreign/second language proficiency in general and speaking in particular, as well as their cognitive capability to assimilate input and utter their thoughts correctly which inevitably affects their speaking test grades.