Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA): Causes and Classroom Strategies to Mitigate Anxiety among ESL Learners

The ability to communicate in the target language is essential as it demonstrates learners’ capacity to express their ideas and thoughts effectively. Developing speaking skills has been regarded as a complex and challenging process, requiring learners’ efforts and commitment to display precise vocabulary usage, grammatical accuracy, clear pronunciation, proper intonation, and effective body language. Therefore, speaking English in public often creates fear and anxiety (PSA) among students, especially when they are learners of English as Second Language (ESL). This study aims to determine major-provoking causes of PSA among ESL learners, besides identifying classroom strategies that the students employed to alleviate the anxiety. Four public speaking anxiety strategies theory by Kondo and Ying Ling (2004) are employed in the study. This quantitative study involves 106 students of the English study program at a public university in Malaysia. The results reveal that the most chosen strategy by the students to overcome their public speaking anxiety (PSA) is the relaxation strategy (mean score 3.8), followed by the preparation strategy as the second strategy with the mean score 3.8, then third is positive thinking strategy and peer-seeking strategy is the least chosen strategy. Results of this study are believed to be beneficial to the ESL learners, academicians, and the policy makers.