bachelorThesis
Causes of and solutions to decrease speaking anxiety in EFL learners
Fecha
2022-08-30Autor
Armijos Uzho, Dayana Milene
Cárdenas Álvarez, Gabriela Estefanía
Institución
Resumen
This research synthesis aimed to analyze the causes of and solutions to decrease EFL
learners’ speaking anxiety. In order to collect the respective data for this descriptive
bibliographic research, twenty-two empirical articles were meticulously analyzed. The
objectives of this paper are to identify the main factors that provoke speaking anxiety in EFL
learners, to recognize the best suitable strategies and methods to aid students to alleviate this
disorder, and to understand positive students’ perspectives toward strategies and methods
used by teachers to reduce language anxiety. The results revealed that the main causes of
speaking anxiety are communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test
anxiety. Additionally, there are other factors that raise this condition in EFL learners. They
are lack of vocabulary and confidence, inappropriate pronunciation, poor participation in
speaking activities at schools, teacher’s poor attention to speaking anxiety in the classroom,
and negative feedback. Besides, the results demonstrated that the strategies and methods to
decrease speaking anxiety are technological and non-technological. The technological
strategies are websites equipped with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), SmartphoneIntegrated model, and Mobile Apps: WhatsApp. The non-technological ones are the creation
of an adequate classroom atmosphere and teachers’ empathy toward students, use of drama
techniques as well as oral group activities, and appropriate way of providing feedback. In
addition, the findings showed that students have a positive perspective toward the
technological and non-technological strategies and methods because they help students
significantly to reduce their high levels of anxiety if teachers implement them correctly.
Finally, it would be interesting to develop more research about causes of and solutions to
decrease EFL students’ speaking anxiety in Ecuador because most of the research studies
were performed in Asia