The Correlation Between Students’ Level of Speaking Anxiety and Their Speaking Achievement

Abstract

This study was conducted to examine whether there is a significant correlation between students’ level of speaking anxiety and their speaking achievement in the English Department of Halu Oleo University students of year 2020 and to examine the influence of moderate anxiety levels on the students. There are 116 college students in the overall population of the year 2020 students that have participated in a basic speaking subject, while the sample that is taken is only 20% of them which is 22 of the students that have participated in the said subject. The data of this study is collected through a questionnaire regarding Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) from Hortwitz et al (1984) and the speaking test consisted of 6 basic speaking items from the TOEFL test. The researcher used the Pearson-product moment correlation coefficient to find the correlation between students’ level of speaking anxiety and their speaking achievement based on 5 categories namely: Very High, High, Moderate, Low, and Very Low as the result of the correlation. And subsequently, used Whatsapp, Google Documents, Google Drive, and Youtube media were used to collect the data of both variables and analyze it using IBM SPSS statistics to provide the inferential data. The result of the data found that the coefficient correlation is -.290 which is considered a negative low correlation, this means that the more one variable increase, the more the other variable decrease or vice versa. In this case, the students’ speaking achievement increased while their level of speaking anxiety decreased is more dominant than the other way, however, the significance result of the correlation was .190 which is higher than the sig. 0.05, this means that the correlation is insignificant or significanly negligible. Thus, the hypothesis cannot be accepted.