International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

Foreign language learning anxiety has been widely discussed over past decades, particularly the anxiety that students suffer when speaking. For most EFL students in Taiwan, for instance, speaking English is not a common occurrence in daily life, which results in their apprehensiveness when speaking English either in public or in class. Although previous studies have indicated possible variables leading to learners’ speaking anxiety, little attention has been paid to examining what pedagogical instructions may effectively improve learner anxiety in speaking English, in particular in Taiwan. This being so, this study aims to explore the effects of learning through online, authentic video clips on Taiwanese EFL non-English-majors’ performance on speaking anxiety. A total of 29 first-year college students joined the experimental study, which lasted for five weeks. Quantitative data were collected to shed light on the students’ changes over the course of the experiment. The results reveal marginal significance in terms of the students’ overall learning attitudes, with a particularly apparent improvement in their communication apprehension. Students’ speaking skills were also significantly improved, lending further support to the effects of authentic English-language videos on EFL student speakers. This paper concludes with implications and suggestions for future research.