Anxiety In Oral Presentation Among ESL Students: Factors and Strategies

Abstract

Oral anxiety is one of the factors that impede students’ speaking proficiency, and may create unpleasant learning experiences especially in an English as a Second Language (ESL) context. This paper is based on the pedagogical research which focuses on the factors causing ESL students’ anxiety in an in-class English oral presentation. The idea is to identify factors that cause ESL students to get anxious during in-class English oral presentation and to consider oral anxiety coping strategies that are effective for the students. The research is divided in two parts. The first part is literature review and second part is survey development which could be used to find out the ESL students’ oral anxiety with regards to in-class presentation. This paper will only be focusing on the first part of the research. The literature review in this paper was conducted around two research questions: 1) What are the factors that contribute to students’ anxiety in in-class English oral presentation, and 2) What are the strategies students use to reduce their anxiety in in-class English oral presentation? The review is based on previous published journal articles where the findings were compared to identify the best practices. The discussion from this literature review will be used as a basis for the researchers in developing survey in order to investigate the ESL students’ oral anxiety in in-class presentation.