The Power of Self-Talk for Speaking Anxiety Reduction Among EFL Learners
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1501.12Keywords:
self-talk, public speaking anxiety, EFL learners, correlations, perspectivesAbstract
As a necessary skill for learners to express themselves proficiently, speaking has always been an important goal in EFL learning. Despite its importance, many learners experience varying levels of anxiety that disturbs or even constrains their speaking performance. This study aims to examine levels of public speaking anxiety among Saudi EFL university students and frequencies of different types of self-talk implementation. The study also investigates the relationship between self-talk and PSA and the learner’s perceptions of these two variables. The results of the study showed that more than half of the participants (53.2%) were highly anxious while the remaining participants were either moderate or low anxious as represented by almost equal percentages (24.8%), (22%) respectively. The study also indicated that all participants had either moderate or high frequency of self-talk and its subcategories while no participants had low frequency of both total and subcategories of self-talk. The findings also proved that there was a negative correlation between public speaking anxiety and self-reinforcement. Qualitative analysis supported quantitative results in this study and some important recommendations were suggested based on the findings.
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