Tracing back the Issue of Speaking Anxiety among EFL Indonesian Secondary Students: From Possible Causes to Practical Implications

This paper aims to scrutinize the possible causes of speaking anxiety issue among the Indonesian EFL secondary students and the critical implications to alleviate the issue. Although several studies have discussed the causes of speaking anxiety, those studies do not emphasize the interrelationship between each cause. Hence, this paper attempts to enrich the related field by tracing back the interconnected relationship between the causes of speaking anxiety, as well as rethinking the possible solutions to cope with this issue. Through the exploration of existing empirical studies and the further discussion on Foreign Language Anxiety framework proposed by Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986) as the secondary research data, this study classifies the causes of speaking anxiety into two major causes, including affective-related and linguistic-related causes. The promotion of cooperative learning atmosphere and the needs to rebalance the focus of achieving linguistic accuracy and providing broad speaking opportunities are the critical solutions to cope with the issue. This paper also provides suggestions to enlighten both EFL teachers and researchers in conducting classroom activities in rethinking future research agendas.