Exploring English language learners’ speaking anxiety: A narrative inquiry.[Unpublished MPhil Dissertation]

Abstract

This research unfolds narratives of EFL learners regarding English speaking anxiety in the context of Nepal. It critically explored the social, cultural, and institutional narratives of Nepalese English language learners on speaking anxiety. In addition to that, it also looked into the socio-cultural influences in creating the situation of fear in learners and its impacts on the academic performance of learners. I employed a narrative inquiry as it is a postmodern or post human storytelling approach which focuses on the critical lens to approach the ontological and epistemological context in a meaningful way. I selected four late teen age English language learners from Tamghas- based public secondary schools of grades XI, XII and undergraduates from community campus caring line up of setting, events, process, purposes, and research questions. I attended to both the personal and social conditions of my participants' experiences delving into the social, institutional, and linguistic narratives as the best sources for data. My inquiry on speaking anxiety has been set in the context of my own living experiences and my participants’ living and told stories which give insights about the learners' bitter and better experiences of English language learning. I applied critical event narrative analysis to infer themes from the raw data gained from the participants. I stood on the two important theoretical stance of Stephen Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis and The Psychological Educational Approach as suitable learners' centered theories to build meaning from the collected data in the form of stories. Since the main focus of my study is to explore the most affective factors that give the sense of hesitation to speak, the anxiety inducing reasons, manifestation of anxious feelings in varied forms, and encourage the learners to be active participants and contributors in the ELT as haven space. The equally important intention of my research is to motivate the anxious learners to be critical in the language classrooms. The insights gained from this research revealed that the participants experience speaking anxiety as a barrier and debilitating factor that explicitly hinders academic performance of the language learners in general and learning speaking English language in specific. Various social, linguistics, physical, and institutional aspects played a major role in creating the sense of speaking anxiety in the participants. The critical narratives events and told stories of the research participants reflected that English language speaking anxiety is caused by various sources like peers, teacher’s treatments, evaluative situations, communicative situations, linguistics difficulties and sense of low self, physical factors and weak perceptions. English speaking anxiety is manifested in different forms such as physical manifestation, linguistic manifestation and social manifestations. From the study, I conclude that the students with speaking anxiety think and take language classroom context as the most anxiety provoking situation in which they have to share things in oral form and demands them to demonstrate their ability to speak in English in front of others. In such situation they have the weak psychology, hidden fear of negative comments, hopeless evaluative situation created by their teachers, and bullying and negative responses from peers that generate feeling of fear and finally adds a fuel to their anxiety level. The frequent experiences of negative evaluation block their openness and their ability to perform in similar situations in the future. Students are always under controlled and structured environment that compel them to be insecure in front of teachers, peers, and family. The conclusion of this research is that despite the students’ well consciousness about the ever-expanding needs of English in this present global world and their efforts and willingness to do well in the English language speaking, it is the speaking anxiety that has played an affective role in their learning process so far. This study concluded that teachers are indeed major determinants of students’ English-speaking anxiety. Teachers' shown behavioral and instructional attitudes have a major role in increasing students' anxiety and apprehension in utilizing the target language orally, which has an impact on their English-speaking performance. In this respect, there are a lot of chances that they learn better and feel less anxious if they are motivated, encouraged and well treated by the English language teachers employing the critical pedagogy and learners centered learning atmosphere along with adequate speaking exposures for the learners in ELC.