Learners’ Anxiety Toward Speaking Skill

According to their perceptions, lack of effort was observed to grow repeat EFL learners’ anxiety toward speaking skill. Salima, Zahira, and Anissa (2015), found out lack of practice to be one of the most prominent factors of failure in speaking among the EFL students. Moreover, Demir (2017) revealed personal lack of practice as a factor covering a major part in the EFL learners’ attributions for failure in speaking skills. Accordingly, a consistency could be ascertained in this finding through relooking at the relationship between students’ low language performance and FLA (Sparks and Ganschow, 1991). As a solution, other than motivating students to practice, teachers ought to promote interactive practice and build upon previous instruction as much as possible in a speaking class.

Repeat EFL learners consider the lack of prominence given to writing skills by the teaching curriculum one of the most effective factors to cause growing anxiety toward the writing skill. The finding seems possible as repeat students’ request for writing instruction was more in relation to the instruction of other skills. However, to state the possible reasons for this attribution to anxiety, a couple of studies may be referred. As the first reason, time constraints in writing activities may have grown their anxiety toward this skill, which deprives them of enough practice (Shen, 1999; Feng, 2001). Specifically, time constraints may affect students’ process-writing experience adversely (Fatt, 2007). Furthermore, due to time limitations, ineffective prewriting activities could emerge, resulting in low performance in writing (Chiste & O’Shea, 1990). Hosseini, Taghizadeh, Abedin, and Naseri (2013) expressed that the writing skills can be significant criteria for the students’ higher academic position and greater educational success. Hence, the students need to get more time in writing activities of which frequency could be increased by offering time-on-task, to actively engage them in learning this skill at appropriate levels of difficulty (Fisher, 2009).

Repeat students’ perspectives attributed their growing anxiety toward writing skills to their teachers’ lack of proficiency in teaching this skill. Some possible factors related to the aspects of teachers’ writing teaching skills may have demotivated, decreased their performance and then grow an anxiety toward this particular skill. First of all, EFL teachers may own various practices in writing classes such as treating the writing drafts with a final product-oriented view and correcting all errors (Fatt, 2007). Also, Spence (2010) questioned the reliability of analytical rubric which is used in writing assessment. She asserted that these rubrics were meant for native speakers and cease to support the socio-cultural approach to language learning. Considering the existence of such problems, teachers should gain more insights into the aspects of teaching writing and modify their rubrics according to their students’ socio-cultural identities (Fatt, 2007; Spence, 2010).