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Journal of Education & Social Sciences - Volume 2, Issue 2 2014
By M. Fareed Dar, Imran Khan
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Keywords: Oral communication apprehension, undergraduate students, engineering students, gender, English as second language, English as third language
This paper investigates the levels of oral communication anxiety of undergraduate engineering students in Pakistan. The data was collected from four departments of the university. \citeA{mccroskey1978} oral Communication Apprehension (OCA) Survey Instrument was adopted for this study. The questionnaire was translated into Urdu (National Language of Pakistan) to make it clear to respondents. The data analysis revealed 18\% of the sample had a high level of oral communication apprehension, 66\% faced an average level of oral communication apprehension and 16\% were in a low level of oral communication apprehension. This study also discloses that there is no significant difference in levels of oral communication apprehension of male and female. Further the study reports and compares levels of oral communication anxiety of the students to whom English is the second language and to whom English is the third language (both in foreign language context). Finally, the study concludes that although the majority of the undergraduate engineering students face an average level of oral communication apprehension, however, with attention and guidance they can be brought to low level of oral communication apprehension category.