MEASURING SPEAKING ANXIETY AMONG SPEECH COMMUNICATION COURSE STUDENTS AT THE ARAB AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF JENIN (AAUJ)

Abstract

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors which lead to speaking anxiety among speech communication course students’ in the English classroom. The three domains that usually affect students’ performance (test anxiety factors, communication anxiety factors, and fear of negative feedback anxiety have been investigated by means of a well known scale (FLCAS) in addition to more items were added to the scale by the researcher. The sample of the study consisted of (104) students at the Arab American University in Palestine. The data is analyzed using the descriptive statistics (means and standard deviation). The findings of the study revealed that the fear of negative feedback received the highest mean (2.93), followed by communication anxiety (2.80) and test anxiety received the lowest mean (2.68). The paper concludes with a number of recommendations on how to reduce speaking anxiety in the English language classroom to foreign learners.