المستخلص: |
In the light of the humanistic approach to language teaching that focuses on students’ affective needs, the present study aimed to the research the correlation between speaking anxiety and oral fluency and grammatical accuracy among EFL students in oral tasks. With randomly stratified sampling, the researcher recruited 297 EFL students in New Valley Faculty of Education to answer a Speaking Anxiety Scale and an IELTS speaking proficiency test. The speech of EFL student-teachers was observed, audio-recorded, transcribed and coded for investigating three temporal measures of oral fluency including speaking rate by word, mean length of run and average length of pauses as well as one temporal measure of grammatical accuracy including percentage of error-free utterances. Descriptive statistics using SPSS were utilized to analyze the data. The major findings of the current study revealed, firstly, that EFL students suffer from a "Moderate" level of speaking anxiety. Secondly, they suffer mostly from "communication apprehension". Thirdly, in terms of the correlation of some background variables to speaking anxiety, no statistically significant difference was found between males and females on the three categories of speaking anxiety. Fourthly, results showed statistically significant differences for all variables of oral fluency in light of the speaking proficiency test. Also, statistically significant differences were found for all variables of grammatical accuracy. Finally, a statistically significant negative correlation was found between oral proficiency and levels of speaking anxiety among EFL student-teachers. The pedagogical implications of these findings for enhancing EFL student-teachers' communication abilities in the target language were discussed, as are suggestions for future research
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