Spoken and Written Discourse: An Assessment of English Language Efficacy and Anxiety of Padre Garcia National High School Students

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Speaking and writing are two of the communication skills that are deemed important in today's fast-paced world. Senior High school students face different opportunities to express themselves in either speaking or writing. These opportunities can best be seen in regular performance tasks thatthey are expected to accomplish.

METHODS

The total sample consisted of 283 Senior High school students from a private school in Cavite and a public school in Batangas. The participants were selected through convenience sampling. All of them gave their consent to participate in the study. Since most respondents are below 18 years of age, their parents' consent was also secured for the research. Speaking and writing self-efficacy were operationally defined from the relevant components mentioned in the Instruments section.

RESULTS

Univariate or Multivariate Outliers. To check for outliers in the data, a multiple regression analysis was performed with all the dependent variables for the MANOVA as independent variables of the multiple linear regression. Outliers were identified based on a critical Chi-square at a significance level of .001 with degrees of freedom equal to the number of dependent variables (in this case, degrees of freedom is 2). Multivariate Normality. This was performed by testing for the normality of each dependent variable for all combinations of groups of the two independent variables (anxiety and efficacy for both writing and speaking).

DISCUSSIONS

The findings of the study highlight the strong possibility that speaking and writing anxiety levels of the students have an effect on communicative performance. This is consistent with available literature pointing out that an anxious student may not perform well in language tasks. Efficacy on the said tasks may not be that evident as seen in the results of the study. This can be explained by other variables such as the age and personality of the respondents.