ZulaikhaKhairuddin 2013717197

Statements of Problem. Speaking is so much a part of daily life that some people might take for granted (Thornbury, 2005). As known, speaking skill is the second skill acquired by human beings after listening. It is the circle of skills that is acquired by people, from listening to speaking, to reading, and lastly, to writing. In other words, speaking skill is very important in humans daily life because in order to communicate, people must use the language. Speaking is defined as an interactive process when we want to convey the meaning of sentences. Furthermore, both the messenger and receiver produce, receive and process the input (Brown, 1994; Burns & Joyce, 1997). Speaking is a speech that has its own skills, structures, and conventions which are different from written language (Burns & Joyce, 1997; Carter & McCarthy, 1995; Cohen, 1996). In Malaysian context, students of higher education usually do not use English to speak informally although they are required to use it in the classroom formally whenever there are presentations. As they are not used to using the language, it might be difficult for them to present in English and they would resort to use their mother tongue. A problem might arise as they might not be marketable enough in the future when they hunt for jobs. Hence, English speaking skill is very important. Other than that, when studying at universities, students need to master presentation skills in order to perform well in class as they are assessed for their presentations. The lecturers or tutors must teach the students how to present in a proper manner. Presentation skills are very important because speakers need to attract the audiences interest in order for them to convey and deliver the message excellently. Speakers also need to be loud and clear in delivering the speech. Speakers also need to find interesting topics in order to make the presentation become livelier. Speech anxiety and limited presentation skills are the major problems that lead to students' oral presentation failures. In order to help students effectively cope with their fear of making oral presentations, it is essential for teachers to acknowledge that speech anxiety and students being anxious are perfectly normal. Having an open discussion on speech anxiety will assist students to feel that they are not alone. Lack of experience is usually the main producer of students stress and nervousness. Experience builds confidence and this is crucial to effective oral presentations. In addition, students with low self-esteem or poor language proficiency levels could become discouraged by other domineering or highly skilled language users within their group and might remain passive in class. Furthermore, lecturers need to

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provide students with real-life language experience. Students can use it in their life especially in their future careers. Additionally, other tertiary institutions have expressed specific opinions about the need for additional experiences in speaking in courses offered by college. Shaw (1999) echoes Smiths (1997) sentiment which is when students speak on academic topics, it raises their presentation skills and reinforces their mastery of material. However, the limitations of courses with oral communication emphasised in terms of attaining broadbased skills in oral communication. In order to fully learn the complexities of communication, students should also enrol in communication courses. In these courses, communication theory and process serve as the primary content which focuses on personal perception, listening, verbal and non-verbal communication, audience analysis and adaptation, message types, message expression, and communication ethics (Maryland Intersegmental Chief Academic Officers, 1999). For this reason, the definition as presented elsewhere in this report recognizes that courses with oral communication emphases focus primarily on building presentation skills as a sub-set of oral communication within the context of a content course. According to Khoo (2001) and Zeigler (2007), lack of communication skills has been one of the factors that lead to unemployable graduates. This is one of the major issues some stakeholders like parents, students and the society are concerned of (Vijan, 2007; Phang, 2006).There are so many researches that had been done on speaking anxiety among school students and universities students. Based onKhairiIzwan and NurulLina (2010), the students level of anxiety in speaking in English is on moderate level. Other than that, students have difficulties in speaking in English language because they were anxious when they were evaluated by teachers. (SitiHaryati, 2007). This study is actually can benefit the lecturers. This is because, in Naveed Ahmad (2011), the result showed that more than half of students mentioned that they have inadequate skills in asking questions, giving presentation and also speaking in group or pair work. As a conclusion, this study will benefit the students in order for them to improve their speaking skill especially for English language and it will benefit the lecturers too. This is because the lecturers will get info about the students problem and at the same time the lecturers can help students to improve their speaking skill.