SPEAKING ANXIETY, SELF-PERCEIVED PRONUNCIATION, SPEECH RATE, AND ORAL ENGLISH PERFORMANCE AMONG GRADE 11 THAI EFL STUDENTS IN SATUN, THAILAND

Abstract

Speaking in English involves affective, perceptual, and linguistic dimensions that may be experienced differently by individual learners. This study aimed to describe speaking anxiety, self-perceived pronunciation, speech rate, and English performance among Grade 11 Thai EFL students and to describe their observed oral performance in grammar, speech rate, and pronunciation. The study employed a quantitative descriptive design involving 25 students at private Islamic School in Satun, Thailand. All 25 students completed a 26-item questionnaire, while 10 students were selected purposively to participate in an “Introduce Myself” speaking task. Questionnaire validity was examined using corrected item-total correlation, and internal consistency was examined using Cronbach’s Alpha. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the questionnaire responses and speaking-test performance. The validity analysis showed that 10 of the 26 questionnaire items met the predetermined criterion: five items for speaking anxiety, one for pronunciation, three for speech rate, and one for English performance. The original 26-item questionnaire produced a Cronbach’s Alpha of .789, while the retained 10-item set produced a coefficient of .817. Preliminary descriptive means for the original questionnaire item groups were 3.22 for speaking anxiety, 3.39 for pronunciation, 3.12 for speech rate, and 2.44 for English performance; these values are interpreted cautiously because they included items subsequently identified as invalid. In the speaking test, speech rate obtained a mean of 3.30, while grammar and pronunciation each obtained a mean of 3.20. The mean final speaking score was 64.67. The findings provide context-specific descriptive information about the participating students’ English-speaking experiences and oral performance. They should not be generalized to Thai students more broadly because of the limited sample, the smaller speaking-test group, and the measurement limitations identified in the study.

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