Students’ perceptions of speaking anxiety, collaborative learningand the use of different strategies to cope with speaking anxiety : Aquantitative study

Sammanfattning: English speaking skills and the ability to collaborate with others are essential in our global society. Students need to be provided with the knowledge to actively participate in society and develop the ability to use different strategies to support their communication. However, speaking anxiety and not knowing how to cope with speaking anxiety could pose a problem for language learners, affecting their academic achievement. This quantitative study investigated students’ perceptions of speaking anxiety and working in groups or pairs in the foreign English classroom. A questionnaire was used and answered by secondary school students, attending their last year at two different schools. The study identified which strategies students use to cope with speaking anxiety. It was found that the majority of the participants experienced working collaboratively had positive outcomes on their experienced speaking anxiety and over a half of the language learner’s believed working in groups made them speak and participate more during English lessons. Fear of negative evaluation showed being the lowest source for experienced speaking anxiety while the most anxiety-provoking situation was having to speak publicly in class. In addition, the study showed that actively encourage oneself by taking risks in the language classroom was the most common used strategy to cope with speaking anxiety in the language classroom. Moreover, a third of the participants expressed they did not know any strategy to use to cope with their speaking anxiety.