Causes of and solutions to decrease speaking anxiety in EFL learners

Abstract

This research synthesis aimed to analyze the causes of and solutions to decrease EFL learners’ speaking anxiety. In order to collect the respective data for this descriptive bibliographic research, twenty-two empirical articles were meticulously analyzed. The objectives of this paper are to identify the main factors that provoke speaking anxiety in EFL learners, to recognize the best suitable strategies and methods to aid students to alleviate this disorder, and to understand positive students’ perspectives toward strategies and methods used by teachers to reduce language anxiety. The results revealed that the main causes of speaking anxiety are communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation, and test anxiety. Additionally, there are other factors that raise this condition in EFL learners. They are lack of vocabulary and confidence, inappropriate pronunciation, poor participation in speaking activities at schools, teacher’s poor attention to speaking anxiety in the classroom, and negative feedback. Besides, the results demonstrated that the strategies and methods to decrease speaking anxiety are technological and non-technological. The technological strategies are websites equipped with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), SmartphoneIntegrated model, and Mobile Apps: WhatsApp. The non-technological ones are the creation of an adequate classroom atmosphere and teachers’ empathy toward students, use of drama techniques as well as oral group activities, and appropriate way of providing feedback. In addition, the findings showed that students have a positive perspective toward the technological and non-technological strategies and methods because they help students significantly to reduce their high levels of anxiety if teachers implement them correctly. Finally, it would be interesting to develop more research about causes of and solutions to decrease EFL students’ speaking anxiety in Ecuador because most of the research studies were performed in Asia