FACTORS AFFECTING FEAR IN PUBLIC SPEAKING OF

15O STUDENTS OF EASTERN VALLEY SCHOOL

A.Y 2019-2020

Submitted by:

Moralios, Angelica

Varron, James Clarenze O.

Submitted to:

Ms. Cherry Mae D. Manalo

 CHAPTER 1

THE PROBLEM AND IT’S BACKGROUND

This chapter contains the introduction, theoretical and conceptual framework,

statement of the problem, assumptions of the study, scope and limitations, and the

significance of the study.

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Public speaking is the process and act of speaking or giving a lecture to a group

of people in a structured, deliberate manner intended to inform, influence, or entertain a

listening audience. Public speaking is commonly understood as face-to-face speaking

between individuals and an audience for the purpose of communication. It is closely

allied to “presenting”, although the latter is more often associated with commercial

activity. Most of the time, public speaking is to persuade the audience.

The art of speaking in public is not new. Its long tradition can be traced back to

Classical Greece (approximately 490-322 BC). Any young men leaving at that time were

expected to acquire and develop public speaking skills as part of their duties as citizens.

The first rules of a public speech were elaborated on over 2000 years ago by the Greek

philosopher and teacher of Alexander the Great – Aristotle

After the ascension of Rome, public speaking techniques developed in Greece

were copied and modified by the Romans. Here, oratory lost its dominance in the
political arena, but gained wide popularity as a form of entertainment, allowing famous

orators to gain political power and wealth by using their public speaking skills. Amongst

such people was Marcus Tullis Cicero – a lawyer, politician, philosopher, who gained

fame as Rome’s greatest orator. Around 50 B.C. Cicero wrote his treatise called “De

Oratore” where he explained his “Five Canons of Rhetoric” that are widely used by

many public speakers up to this day.

The widespread accessibility of mass media and especially, the Internet, has

made it easy for us to reach a vast audience and let our voice be heard. Public

speaking has evolved from a skill reserved by a selected few to one of the most

powerful marketing, educational and brand promotion tools in any business.

It is safe to say that in the modern business world just about every well-paid

position requires some form of public speaking, be it giving a group sales presentation,

presenting your ideas to the board of directors, speaking to a committee or telling a

group of potential clients about your company during a corporate event.

Despite being competent in their field of work, professional's worldwide struggle

due to lack of good public speaking skills. Their assessments and appraisals are often

not depictive of their professional competitiveness; therefore, it is important for students

to overcome public speaking anxiety before they transit from academic life to

professional life.

More people on this planet are afraid of speaking in front of a crowd than they

are of death. Well, at least according to a study where people are being asked to list the
thing they are most afraid of. We find “Public Speaking” far ahead of the fear of heights,

spiders or even financial problems.

There are two kind of people. Those who are more calm when there are family

and friends in the audience, and those who are more calm and relaxed when there is no

one they know in the audience. Therefore, if you are scared of speaking in public and

interacting orally with other people in academic or daily situations, you could be

certainly having ego problems and serious drawbacks in your social life, too. Probably,

your self-esteem and self-confidence as well as the image you have got of yourself as a

speaker might be affected. So, you could be starting losing power, feeling frustrated,

and becoming an invisible and passive person. Why? This is because of the lack of

communicative and argumentative skills, and also because we need to learn how to

have fears and emotions under control. On the other hand, we have noticed that when

most foreign language students have to interact in front of the class, they feel extremely

anxious, can become highly stressed and almost sick because it is very difficult for them

to control their nerves; this fact undoubtedly affects their oral performance and the

outcomes are very often catastrophic. Bearing these concerns in mind, the purpose of

the current article is to share some advice and recommendations which can become

useful tips to follow when students have to socialize work projects, research proposals,

oral reports, or even during any other public speaking circumstances; all the more

reason, since they have to communicate ideas in the foreign language they are

acquiring.

Fear of public speaking can prevent you from taking risks to share your ideas, to

speak about your work, and to present your solutions to problems that affect many
people — and as a result, it can affect how much you grow personally and

professionally, and how much impact you can have. At the same time, any negative

public speaking experiences will make it less likely that you will speak in public in the

future — fear teaches you to protect yourself from risky situations.

The average person speaks approximately 17,000 words per day (Why Men Talk

Less, n.d.). In addition, depending on the level of education, most people have a

vocabulary of about 50,000 to 70,000 words (Number of Words, n.d.). Most people are

quite comfortable speaking to friends, acquaintances, and even the occasional retail

clerk. Ideas, compatible or dissenting, are frequently communicated in an open forum in

front of others. The fact that verbal communication is so primary to humans makes it

difficult to imagine the fear of public speaking ranking at the top of the fear list.

Most people are not born as a public speaker; they are trained to become one. When

they find themselves in situations where they become the focus of attention as they

have address audience, they experience emotions like fear and anxiety. Most of them

try to avoid situations where have to perform or speak in public.

The purpose of this study is to identify and investigate the causes behind this

kind of case problem. The study presents the reasons behind the fear when it comes to

public speaking specifically on students.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

This research would be concern on the factors affecting fear in public speaking of

150 respondents of Eastern Valley School A.Y 2019-2020

This research attempted to answer the following question:

I. What is the profile of the respondents regards to:

1. Name

2. Age

3. Gender

4. Grade Level

II. What are the common factors that affect the fear of public speaking of 150

students in Eastern Valley School?

1. Psychological Factors

1.1. Fear / Anxiety

1.2. Pressure

1.3. Lack of Confidence

2. Language Barrier
 3. Knowledge and Information

4. Skills

III. What are the related factors that can affect the fear of public speaking of 150

students in Eastern Valley School?

1. Delivery

2. Bullying

3. Teacher's approach

4. Experience

IV. What are the possible solution to the factors affecting the fear of public

speaking of 150 students in Eastern Valley School?

1. Curriculum emphasis on public speaking

2. Strengthening the communication between student, teachers, and the

community

3. Training and Workshop

4. Encouragement of teachers to the student

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This study is focused on the effect of different factors in students when it

comes to public speaking. It will analyze the reasons that influences an individual

specifically students why some of them, public speaking is one of their major

weakness. This study might help us to make a solution or solve this kind of serious

problems, to avoid the effects of it to a person and to improve them.

Student. Students is the one of the most benefited to this research. The reason and

the possible effects of having a fear in public speaking was discussed within the

research. It also has the possible solution to help anyone whose experiencing this

kind of problem.

Teacher. The teachers will also benefit because it contains different solution that

can help them or it can add it to their knowledge to share, recommend and serves

as motivation on their present and future students or any teaching related.

Community. This research can also help the community. Each people living in a

community can learn something from this research specially when someone is relating
to the topic. It can give some information because it contains a lot of knowledge.

School admin. It will help the by giving them insights from this research and the can

apply something related to this kind of problem.

Researcher. We are also benefited by conducting this research because they

learned a lot of knowledge and lessons during research. It will help us what skills are

we needed to enhance and improve.

Future researcher. This can also help the future researcher. The can use it as

guide or even example for them to make their own research paper. They can get

some important information here.

SCOPE AND LIMITATION

This study is focused on the factors affecting fear in public speaking. Since this is

an analysis paper, the question presented were answered. It only discussed the

cognitive, psychosocial, and analytical factors within the vicinity of Eastern Valley

School. Most of all, the work is analyzed within the capacity of the researchers.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
 According to the studies conducted by Valencia & Nader (2008), and also by

other researchers such as Edwards (1998, 2008), Rogers (1981), Kleinmann (1977),

Scovel (1978), and Bailey (1980), nowadays talking in public has become one of the

biggest fears of people due to the high influence of psychological factors this practice

involves.

The fear of public speaking is the most common phobia ahead of death, spiders,

or heights. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that public speaking anxiety,

or glossophobia, affects about 73% of the population. The underlying fear is judgment

or negative evaluation by others. Public speaking anxiety is considered a social anxiety

disorder.

A common fear in public speaking is the brain freeze. The prospect of having an

audience’s attention while standing in silence feels like judgment and rejection. A

common fear in public speaking is the brain freeze. The prospect of having an

audience’s attention while standing in silence feels like judgment and rejection. The pre-

frontal lobes of our brain sort our memories and is sensitive to anxiety. Dr. Michael De

Georgia of Case Western University Hospitals, says: “If your brain starts to freeze up,

you get more stressed and the stress hormones go even higher. That shuts down the

frontal lobe and disconnects it from the rest of the brain. It makes it even harder to

retrieve those memories.” According to research, the prospect of speaking in public

evokes fear and anxiety for many individuals, and speech anxiety often poses a serious

problem for those who have it. Numerous occupations require people to speak publicly,

at least on occasion, and for many individuals the fear and anxiety that it evokes can
greatly impair performance. While anxiety tends to impair performance on difficult

cognitive tasks generally, it poses especially difficult problems for public speaking. The

cognitive demands of delivering a speech can be considerable. Speech performance

may generally benefit from the individual's flexibly shifting attention between the self,

speech, and audience, as desired. However, unintentional breaks in focus at

inopportune times are likely to prove detrimental. Moreover, the experience of speech

anxiety and efforts to control it may themselves consume considerable cognitive

resources. Thus, public speaking can pose a formidable self-regulatory challenge. This

analysis is consistent with attentional control theory (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, &

Calvo, 2007), which distinguishes between two relevant attentional systems and posits

that anxiety impairs cognitive performance by hampering goal-directed attentional

processes while leaving stimulus-driven processes that respond to environmental cues

relatively intact. Anxiety produced by public speaking should be more debilitating for

those who have difficulty self-regulating their attention. Substantial variability in this

capacity has been observed across individuals. Attentional control is considered by

some investigators to be a factor of temperament, in other words, a heritable individual

difference (Derryberry & Rothbart, 1988; Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981). Prior research

on attentional control has found it is capable of accounting for differences in self-

regulatory performance (e.g., Derryberry & Rothbart, 1988; Lonigan, Vasey, Phillips, &

Hazen, 2004). Derryberry and Reed (2002) demonstrated that self-reported attentional

control predicted performance on an objective attentional control task: individuals with

high trait anxiety were better able to overcome an attentional bias for threatening

information in a dot-probe task to the extent that they also reported higher attentional
control. For those with lower attentional control, the threatening information interfered

with task performance. Lonigan and Vasey (2009) reported a similar pattern in a youth

sample. Peers and Lawrence (2009) provided evidence that self-reports of attentional

control predicted objective performance in a rapid serial visual presentation task with

distractors. (Christopher R. Jones, Russell H. Fazio, and Michael W. Vasey, 2005)

Several studies have demonstrated correlations between measures of attentional

control and diverse outcomes including psychopathology (Baskin-Sommers, Zeier &

Newman, 2009; Muris et al., 2008), anxiety (Muris, de Jong, & Engelen, 2004), and

resilience to trauma (Bardeen & Read, 2010). However, only a few studies have

examined attentional control in a moderating role. Ayduk and colleagues (2008) showed

that rejection sensitivity was associated with self-reported borderline personality

symptoms only for those with low attentional control. Gyurak and Ayduk (2007) found

that low self-esteem predicted increased startle responses to rejection-related stimuli

unless participants also had high attentional control. Treating self-reported anxiety as an

outcome variable, Meesters and colleagues (2007) found its relationship with

neuroticism attenuated in those with high attentional control. Finally, Bardeen and

Orcutt (in press) reported an interaction between attentional control and post-traumatic

stress symptoms predicting attention to threat stimuli.

 Conceptual framework

Input, process and output.

Factors affecting fear in

public speaking of 150

Assessment
respondents of Eastern

Valley School A.Y Formulation of the title

2019-2020
Literature Review
Determined the given
Factors
Gathering data factors and also the

1.Psychological Factors other factors affecting

Data analysis

1.1 Fear/Anxiety fear in public speaking

Make a questionnaire
of 159 respondents of
1.2 Pressure
Survey Eastern Valley School
1.3 Lack of
Statistical treatment A.Y 2019-2020
confidence
Conclusion
2. Language Barrier

3. Knowledge and

Information

4. Skills
Figure 1

The conceptual framework of the Factors affecting fear in public speaking of 150

respondents of Eastern Valley School A.Y 2019-2020.