Public speaking anxiety in an EAP presentation-skills course

With the shift to learner-centredness in EFL, more and more attention has been paid to positive and negative emotions students experience in the classroom. As giving presentations is one of the most typical university learning situations, over the last decade there have been numerous studies dealing with students’ fear of delivering presentations or, in other words, stage fright (Bippus and Daly, 1999) or public speaking anxiety (Bodie 2010). Public speaking is listed among the greatest fears even for native speakers of a language (e.g. survey at UK universities by Russel and Topham, 2012; US universities by Blanco et al., 2008), so it is no surprise it occurs in non-native presenters to an even greater degree; they often claim in their journals they find it much harder to present in English than in Czech or Slovak. Based on a self-compiled corpus of 80 self-reflection journals written by master’s students of a presentation-skills class, the aim of this talk is to examine whether and how the students express their fears and to identify what helps them get rid of their nervousness in the process of giving several talks throughout the term. As will be shown, the entire process is closely linked to boosting students’ self-confidence, not only in public speaking but also when using the foreign language as such.