Students’ Anxiety to Speak English in the Classroom: A Survey on Thai Junior High School Students

In this era, English comes as the most important tool to communicate with other people, especially in speaking skill. However, almost all Thai students still feel anxious to speak in English because of lack of self-confidence to practice communicating or fear of failure to use English to communicate in daily life. This research aimed to investigate speaking anxiety levels and the cause of students’ anxiety from 9thgrade Thai students. The researcher investigated the data by using the quantitative design. This research used the questionnaire from Horwitz et al. (1986) to collect the data. The total sample was 67 students. There were two results in this research. As the first result, the students’ anxiety in speaking, and the result revealed that the students had a moderate level of speaking anxiety. The second result was the cause of students’ anxiety in speaking. The highest score was 3.73 which showed that 9th grade Thai junior high school students felt worried in consequences of failing in English classroom to be a cause of anxiety.