Unpacking Linguistic Determinants of Speaking Anxiety Among EFL Learners: Evidence from an Eastern Indonesian University

Abstract

Speaking is widely regarded as the most anxiety-inducing skill for learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), yet most research on speaking anxiety in Indonesian higher education foregrounds psychological rather than linguistic sources of that anxiety. Adopting a psycholinguistic perspective on second language (L2) speech production, this study examined the extent to which four linguistic factors, vocabulary limitation, grammar difficulty, pronunciation problems, and lack of fluency, contribute to speaking anxiety among sixth-semester EFL students at a university in Southwest Papua, Indonesia. A descriptive quantitative design was employed, supported by qualitative interview data. Twenty students completed a 24-item Likert-scale questionnaire, and a subset participated in semi-structured interviews. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the questionnaire data, while interview excerpts were used to elaborate the quantitative patterns. The findings show that all four linguistic factors were perceived as substantial sources of anxiety, with lack of fluency and vocabulary limitation showing the strongest association with anxious speech behavior (hesitation, word-finding failure, and avoidance), followed by pronunciation and grammar concerns. These patterns are interpreted through Levelt's (1989) and Kormos's (2006) models of speech production, which suggest that anxiety consumes the attentional resources needed for lexical retrieval, grammatical encoding, and phonological planning. The study contributes context-specific evidence from an underrepresented region of Indonesian EFL research and offers pedagogical implications for fluency-oriented, low-pressure speaking instruction.