THE CORRELATION BETWEEN LISTENING ANXIETY AND VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The background of the study is students think that listening is difficult and because of this statement, students feel anxious when they do the listening tasks and it creates listening anxiety. Gonen (2009) said that students’ listening anxiety is caused by many things such as the material that is difficult to understand, noises and the problem with the audio. Unfamiliar topics, lack of vocabulary, task difficulties, can also make students anxious. Listening anxiety happens when learners have to do some tasks that are difficult for them. (Scarcella and Oxford, 1992.) There is one thing that influence listening anxiety, vocabulary knowledge. In language learning, vocabulary knowledge is an important thing because if students have more vocabulary knowledge, they will successfully increase their language competence. (Laufer & Goldstein, 2004). The aim of the study is to find out whether students experience listening anxiety and the correlation between listening anxiety and vocabulary knowledge. The study included 35 students from Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia consisting of 29 students from batch 2019 taking Listening & Speaking in Academic Context this semester and 6 students from batch 2018 took Listening & Speaking in Academic Context last semester. The instruments used in this study were a listening anxiety questionnaire adapted from Kim (2002), vocabulary knowledge test adapted from Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham (2001) and interview questions adapted from Kim (2002). The research was done through two methods, quantitative methods and qualitative methods. The quantitative method was done through distributing the questionnaire and the vocabulary knowledge test and counting the scores of the questionnaire and vocabulary knowledge test. The qualitative method was done through interview. Based on the study that was analysed by using McCroskey (1970) method and SPSS, the results showed that students have high listening anxiety and there is a low correlation between listening anxiety and vocabulary knowledge.