Vietnamese EFL Students’ Anxiety in Foreign Language Classrooms: Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing

This study aims to investigate the perceived levels of anxiety experienced by Vietnamese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. An assessment of anxiety levels in each skill was conducted using a modified version of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and qualitative interviews with 180 students from a Vietnamese university. The results found that most students experienced a relatively higher level of anxiety in the writing session, and following it are the speaking and listening sessions, where most of them generated pretty high levels of anxiety, with students citing fear of negative evaluations, communication apprehensions, and inadequate preparation as the primary reasons. As opposed to these three language skill sessions, a more moderate level of anxiety was induced in the reading session. The study’s findings are consistent with the established theories, such as Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis and Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory, highlighting the impacts of emotional states and self-beliefs on language learning performance. With these results, the study has proposed some implications for ameliorating language methodology using approaches to reduce students’ anxiety, including consideration of task preparation time, vocabulary support, and employment of small-group work environments. As a result of this study, students’ acquisition and performance of foreign languages could be significantly enhanced by addressing foreign language anxiety in a targeted manner. It is recommended that future research should focus on longitudinal studies to track anxiety changes over time and intervention-based research to reduce skill-specific anxiety.