Factors Influencing Students' Anxiety in English as a Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

There are some influential factors contribute to the low English proficiency of students at higher education. Those influential factors are: teachers' low competence, lacks of facilities and learning aids, and the most intriguing factor is students' anxiety. Foreign language anxiety is interesting phenomenon in the second or foreign language study and the researchers make study on students' anxiety to develop interesting teaching-learning process. Students' anxiety ranging from answering questions to asking questions to the instructor in class. This study aims to explore influential factors towards the students' anxiety in the English as a Foreign Language classroom at higher education in Indonesia. There were sixty four English learners as participants of this research. The participants were the students of English Literature Study Program Faculty of Language and Literature Universitas Negeri Makassar who attended Pronunciation Practice Subject. This study employed descriptive statistics showing the mean, standard deviation, percentage of the students' responses to the questionnaire. Through the use of questionnaire as the instrument of this study, this study identified some contributing factors to students' anxiety: they are (1) students' self-confidence; (2) lecturers' role in the classroom, (3) students' beliefs about material, and (4) lecturers' arrogance in the teaching-learning process in which the teacher presents the material very quickly without considering students' situation.