Abstract Oral communication apprehension, an intense personal fear or anxiety about communicating, is an obstacle that many students encounter when attempting to improve their oral communication ability. This paper reports on an exploratory study that has three objectives: (1) to inform accounting educators and practitioners about a potentially serious oral communication problem, (2) to provide initial empirical evidence about whether beginning accounting majors have above-average communication apprehension, and (3) to introduce accounting educators to techniques for reducing communication apprehension. The Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA) was administered to 845 students, including 161 accounting majors, enrolled in 18 sections of the introductory accounting course at a large university. The results indicate that the beginning accounting majors appear to have above-average levels of communication apprehension.
Stanga et al. (Sat,) studied this question.