Teaching Speaking in ELT (English Language Teaching) is seem to be importance since speaking is being fundamental skill to human communication. However, the EFL students often just keep silent in the Speaking English Classroom. Students might have so many ideas to convey but they often get difficulty in uttering or saying what they suppose to say. This case related to the students’ anxiety. Students with high level of anxiety tend to have difficulty in oral performance since they cannot control themselves. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to explore and describe the problems that are encountered by the students in learning a foreign language which is known as speaking anxiety. This study also to recognize students’ strategies to cope with speaking anxiety.
This research was conducted in a bilingual class at SMP Islam Al Azhar 21 Solo Baru from January 2014 to July 2014 through a qualitative case study approach. The researcher used purposive sampling in selecting the participants of this research. All the nineteen students in this bilingual class participanted for answering the questionnaires. In order to have a further understanding of the students’ foreign language anxiety, some students were selected as the interviewees according to their scores in the questionnaires. In addition, the English teacher was interviewed, too. In this study, questionnaires, interviews, classroom observations, and document collection were applied as instruments. In analyzing the data, the interactive model of data analysis proposed by Miles M.B and Huberman A.M (1984) was used.
The study revealed that; (1) anxiety was experienced by a considerable number of students when speaking English in class, (2) the students reported to be the most anxious when they have speaking test, (3) the causes of students speaking anxiety were the learners’ characteristics and the classroom procedures, (4) the psycholinguistic symptoms often occurred to the students in bilingual program when they were suffering from speaking anxiety, (5) speaking anxiety has a significant impact to students’ speaking achievement (6) the students reported that they used preparation as the behavioral strategies to cope with anxiety, (7) the teacher maintaned a close relationship with the students and also used both English and Indonesia in teaching learning process to cope with students’ speaking anxiety.
On the whole, it is necessary for both English teacher and students to be aware that anxiety is a serious issue for EFL students and that a multiple of variables contributes to it in language classrooms. More importantly, they should realize the urgent need to search for strategies to help students reduce or even eliminate anxiety when speaking English in class.
Keywords: speaking anxiety, speaking achievement, bilingual students