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.
