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STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ANXIETY FACTORS
( A study at the Third Year Students of Tourism Class at SMK N 1 Padang Panjang in academic year 2015/2016 )
Mia Purnama Sari *) Hervina Asty, M.Pd *) dan Elmiati, M.Pd ***)
*) Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat Email: [email protected]
**) Staf Pengajar Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
Email: [email protected]
***) Staf Pengajar Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat
Email: [email protected] Abstract
The purpose of this research is to know what factors that influence student’s anxiety to speak English in of the class. This research is descriptive research. The participants of this research are the third year students of tourism class at SMK N 1 Padang Panjang. Total participants in this research are 23 students, the researcher get by using total sampling technique. In collecting data, researcher use observation of checklist interview and observation.
When the students do guiding practice in front of the class by using speak English. After that, the researcher interview the students by using Indonesian language to avoid misunderstanding.
After finish to collect the data from observation and interview, resercher describe the data per indicators. Researcher can conclude that are three factors that influence students anxiety to speak English in front of the class. First Communication Apprehension, the students anxious to speak English because they had low comprehension about what they talk and they can not speak English fluently. Second Test Anxiety, the students would be nervous because they do not usual speak English in front of the class. Last Fear Negative Evaluation, the students’ uneasiness and tension about others evaluation because they fear of negative evaluation to the other people.
Abstrtak
Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui faktor-faktor apa saja yang mempengaruhi kecemasan siswa dalam berbicara bahasa Inggris di depan kelas. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskriptif. Partisipanya adalah siswa kelas tiga jurusan Pariwisata di SMK N 1 Padang Panjang. Jumlah partisipan dalam penelitian ini adalah 23 siswa yang diambil menggunakan teknik total sampling. Dalam mengumpulkan data, peneliti menggunakan observasi checklist and interview, dimana siswa tampil guiding di depan kelas dengan menggunakan bahasa Inggris. Setelah itu peneliti melakukan interview dengan menggunakan bahasa Indonesia agar tidak terjadi kesalah pahaman. Setelah selesai mengumpulkan data dari observasi dan interview, peneliti mendeskripsikan data tersebut berdasarkan indikator. Peneliti dapat menyimpulkan tiga faktor yang mempengaruhi kecemasan siswa dalam berbicara bahasa Inggris di depan kelas. Pertama adalah Communication Apprehension, siswa takut untuk berbicara bahasa Inggris karena mereka kurang memahami apa yang mereka katakan dan mereka tidak bisa berbicara bahasa Inggris dengan lancar. Kedua Test Anxiety, siswa merasa cemas karena mereka tidak terbiasa berbicara di depan kelas. Terakhir Fear of Negative
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Evaluation, kegelisahan siswa dan ketegangan tentang evaluasi karena mereka takut dengan evaluasi yang negative dari orang lain.
Key Words: students’ speaking anxiety factors INTRODUCTION
`Anxiety is a feeling of apprehension that caused someone always think bad will happend. Speaking anxiety is someones’ anxious feeling when they speak in front of the calss, commonly occurs in communication by foreign language learners. However, some students feel anxious when they speak English and they feel anxiety as a threat, because they cannot manage their anxiety properly.
Being mastering in English specially in oral communication is necessary for students in vocational school especially students in Tourism class. It is one of the central elements of communication, because in daily life most of them speak more than write.
Furthermore, having a good ability in speaking will be the good point for students to get job when they graduate their study, because many of job vacancies require the applicants that fluently in speaking English.
After doing an observation to some students at the Tourism class, researcher found that they have big problem to speak English in front of the class. In their mind, speaking English is difficult and fear. The students anxious when they speak in English, they always thought about grammar, diction and pronunciation. They always think something bad will happend and they feel the teacher and their friends give negative evaluation about their performance. As a consequence, they do not have self- confidence and they lost idea when they speak English.
Based on the explanation above, there are some factors that influence students’ speaking anxiety such as communication apprehension, test anxiety
and fear of negative evaluation, because of that the researcher interested to analyze the students’ speaking anxiety factors, study at third year students of Tourism class at SMKN 1 Padang Panjang in Academic Year 2015/2016.
According to Horwitz (2012:
127), Communication Apprehension is a type of shyness characterized by fear of anxiety about communicating with people.
Difficulty in speaking in pair or groups (oral communication anxiety) or in listening to or learning a spoken message (receiver anxiety) are all manifestations of communication apprehension. The students who exhibit with communication apprehension will not feel comfortable to speak in front of the class/public, commonly they limited language knowledge especially related to speaking and listening
Horwitz (2012:127) state that, Test Anxiety is a type of performence anxiety stemming from a fear by dread of failure. Test-anxious students often put unrealistic demands on themselves and feel that anything less than a perfect test performance is a failure. So that test anxiety is believed as one of the most important aspects of negative motivation.
Horwitz (2012:127) explain that, Fear of Negative Evaluation is a condition where the students are uneasiness, apprehension, and tension about others’
evaluation, which can occurs in any evaluative circumstance where the students be feel more sensitive to the evaluations- real or imagined of their peers. Then, the students who stated in fear of negative evaluation avoidance of evaluative situation and the expectation that other will evaluated them negatively while speaking in foreign language.
3 Based on the explanation above, Communication Apprehension is students’
feeling discomfort, tension and shyness about communication with other people.
The students who belong to this type commonly get difficulty to speaking in front of the class or public because they have lemeted knowledge especially related to speaking.
RESEARCH METHOD
In this research, the researcher conducts this study as descriptive research, because the researcher wants to describe about the phenomena that happened in the field. According to Gay and Airasian (2000: 275) “descriptive study determines and describes the way things are”. It means that descriptive research just describes the phenomena without giving treatment or manipulation. This case is supported the researcher to choose descriptive research as design for this research. In addition, by conducting descriptive research, the researcher try to investigate, to get data, and to describe about The Factors that Influence Students Speaking Anxiety at SMK N 1 Padang Panjang in academic year 2015/2016.
In this research, there are some students by third year of Tourism class at SMK N 1 Padang Panjang in academic year 2015/2016 as the participants. Dick (2000: 20) states, “Participants are group of people that participates in research project”. So that the researcher takes third grade students of Tourism class at SMK N 1 Padang Panjang as participants.
In this research, the researcher used the instrumentation as tool to collect the data. Gay and Arasian (2000: 145) states, “Instrument as tool or something that is used to collect the data”. In this research, Gay and Airasian (2000: 275) states, “descriptive data is usually collected though questionnaire, interview, and observation”. The researcher used observation and interview as the
instruments to find the data during research process in the field.
After collecting the data, the researcher analyzed the data based on observation and interview. According to Gay and Airisian (2000: 241), there are four steps for analyzing qualitative data, reading/memoing, description, classifying, and interpreting.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
The purpose of this research is to know what factors that influence students’
speaking anxiety by the second year in Tourism class at SMKN 1 Padang Panjang in academic year 2015/2016? The result is the students anxious to speak English because of three factors. First Communication Apprehension, the students anxious speak English because they are not good ability in speaking English. It is caused by the students do not comprehend about what they talked and do not self-confidence to speak English in front of the class.
Second Test Anxiety, the students felt anxious to speak English, because they do not like speaking test or speaking practice. They do not have good preparation to speak and they anxious to get low value. The last Fear of Negative Evaluation, the students fear to speak English in front of the class because they think that they will make mistake when they talked and the other students will laugh at them or the teacher will give bad correction.
Furthermore, in tourism class speak English is necessary because in final examination the students do the practice examination using speak English. But Reality many students got difficulty when they speak English, they nervous when they spoke in front of the class, they anxious speaking English and they think something bad will happened. But not every student felt anxious when speak English, some students like to speak
4 English in front of the class because they have ability and self-confidence. They always prepared before they performance because they did not gave something bad to the teacher that impact to the value.
CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION Speaking is a productive skill in oral communication which the human use to express their ideas, feeling, emotion in interacting with other people, and also deliver information or message. In addition, students who will perform speaking in the classroom they feel afraid, anxiety, worry, panic, etc. Anxiety is someone’s anxious feeling when they are speking in front of the calss, it is related to tension, nervousness, worry and fear about something bad will happened in speak English as foreign language. There are theree factors that make the students anxious to speak English in front of the class; communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation.
After doing the investigation phase in the field and analyzing the collected data, the researcher would like to give some suggestions for the students and teacher. First, for the student have know speaking as one of fundamental aspect for the communication in global era which dominated by high technology that commonly using English. The students have to understand that anxiety is the one of negative emotion that can influence in speaking. After that they will aware that they have to practic and more practice to improve their speaking skill by less their anxiety in speaking English.
Second, for the teacher can help the students have high anxiety to less it by make them enjoy speaking English and motivating the students to improve their speaking skill. The teacher has known the creation of a friendly classroom atmosphere is important. Then actively involve them to participation in speaking activities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the first, the researcher also would like to express her deepest gratitude to Mrs. Hervina Asty, M.Pd and Mrs.
Elmiati, M.Pd as my advisor. The researcher thanks for her valuable time, guidance, suggestion, support and comment during the process of finishing this thesis. Secondly, the researcher’s special gratitude goes to Mrs. Yulmiati, M.Pd, Mrs. Astuti Pratiwi, M.Pd and Mr.
Syayid Sandi Sukandi, S.S M.A as the examiner who have given valuable contribution and suggestion to improve this thesis as examiner.
REFERENCES
Horwitz, E.K (2001). Language Anxiety and Achievement. Annual review of applied linguistics.
Horwitz, E.K (2012). Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety. Blackwell Publishing.
Gay, L.R and Peter, Airasian (2000).
Educational research competence for analysis and application. New Jersey: Prantice-Hall Company.
Dick, Ronald SC (2000). Integrating quantitative and qualitative research in development research project. Washington DC: The World Bank.
