Abstract:
As observed, students in ESL classrooms find speaking as one of the most challenging tasks even though they had been studying the language for almost 13 years. There are some students who fear the word “speech”, and consequently, most of them skip English lectures. When facilitating English at the tertiary level, it is important to know how to reach and aid such students with L2 speaking anxiety. This research attempts to investigate the perspective of the post Advanced Level students towards speaking anxiety in the ESL classroom. The objectives of the research are to get a better understanding of the student‟s opinion to approach them with effective teaching methods to improve L2 speaking and to help the students to be more confident in L2 speaking. The sample of the research consists of forty-five post Advanced Level students from an intensive course in a private institute. A questionnaire was administered prior to any speaking activity in the class to examine their attitude and subsequently weekly questionnaires were given while engaged in both individual and group speaking activities for 3 weeks. Before the group activities, it was found that only 4% of the students were unafraid of speaking in English irrespective of the situation they faced, and the number increased to 23% during the second week. At the end of three weeks, there was a considerable change in their attitude towards L2 speaking, but there was a drop in the attendance. There were students who did certain speaking activities for the first time using L2 despite their exposure to English in primary and secondary education. Due to the lack of exposure and the attitude towards L2 speaking, majority were disconnected from L2 speaking. It was concluded that Group activities could be used effectively to bridge the detachment of the students from L2 speaking. Further research is suggested to examine the reasons for the drop in the attendance, which was not focused here due to time constraints.
