| Summary: | 碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 104 === The aims of the thesis are as follows. First, it investigates the levels of public speaking anxiety of Taiwanese college students who are majoring in English. Second, it studies the relationship between students’ public speaking anxiety and their oral proficiency levels and gender differences. Third, it explores the reasons of public speaking anxiety and the ways to deal with it. The participants were two groups of students who study in a university in central Taiwan. They were freshmen and juniors who were majoring in English in an environment of English as a foreign language (EFL). The students’ grades of their English proficiency tests were drawn as the reference of their oral proficiency levels. The participants were given a questionnaire of public speaking anxiety developed by McCroskey (1970, 1992), a survey of their background information of their English proficiency tests, and later-on interviews according to the results of the questionnaire.
These are the results. First, the means of the two groups of participants’ public speaking anxiety levels are moderate. Second, their oral proficiency levels and public speaking anxiety levels did not show a significant correlation. Third, there is a correlation between genders and public speaking anxiety levels. Fourth, there are variety of reasons for public speaking anxiety and the ways to deal with the public speaking anxiety. There are some implications provided based on the results of the study for the teachers of English public speaking. Furthermore, there is a limitation due to not enough males as the participants. Therefore, future researchers could recruit more males as the participants in order to know more about their thoughts toward public speaking anxiety.
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