Exploring English speaking anxiety among Filipino engineering students: its influence on task performance and its sources
The need for effective English speaking skills in engineering fields compels schools to innovate curricula that shall address the language skills of a ‘global engineer.’ The impact of engineering curricular reforms trickled down among students who contend with language learning anxiety, besides a...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2019
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14089/1/31335-108009-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14089/ http://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1212 |
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| Summary: | The need for effective English speaking skills in engineering fields compels schools to
innovate curricula that shall address the language skills of a ‘global engineer.’ The impact of
engineering curricular reforms trickled down among students who contend with language
learning anxiety, besides anxiety from mathematics and other technical courses. In this paper,
the researchers explored English speaking anxiety among 162 engineering students in an
engineering University in Manila, Philippines. A mixed-method, explanatory sequential
design was used. This method combines the quantitative and qualitative approaches in
investigating the phenomenon under study, i.e., English speaking anxiety. In the quantitative
phase, the researchers used data from the speaking component of a self-developed scale and
speaking performance scores yielded from an interactive English conversation task. Analysis
revealed a significant negative relationship between speaking anxiety and speaking task
performance, pointing to the debilitative influence of anxiety on task performance. In the
qualitative phase, semi-structured interviews among nine purposefully selected students
revealed that both peers and teachers were common sources of speaking anxiety and in a
variety of ways. The findings point to speaking anxiety as an important psycho- and
sociolinguistic phenomenon, which is hinged on the specific roles that language teaching and
learning plays in preparing engineering students as future language consumers and users in
highly technical, specialized, and competitive engineering fields. |
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