Abstract

The future of language education is experiencing pedagogical shift due to the new expectation centering on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The communication skill is one of the significant 4IR technical skills apart from 21 st century skills and digital skills which are highly sought after by Human Resource Departments in future employment (Jeshcke, 2015). However, in order to produce future workforce who are not restricted by communicative barriers, learners may be affected by the threat of listening and speaking anxieties. Hence, in an attempt to understand how severe the impacts of listening and speaking anxieties are on university learners, which is the main source of human capital required for the protraction of 4IR, the research objectives of this study are to investigate the impact of language anxiety on listening and speaking skills and discover the causal factors that could contribute to language anxiety in relation to listening and speaking skills. By employing a survey design with a mixed method approach, the Factors of Language Anxiety Questionnaire (FLAQ) was distributed to 125 university learners from non-English programmes. Based on the analysis, it was discovered that learners experienced a severe impact of language anxiety in listening skills in comparison to speaking skills. However, using paired sample t-test, it is discovered that there is no significant difference between the mean scores of listening and speaking anxieties. The impact of language anxiety in both listening and speaking skills was profoundly affected by causal factors such as self-esteem and social anxiety. Therefore, by understanding the impact of listening and speaking anxieties from the learners' perspective, several strategies are recommended which highly emphasise how educators can eliminate the existence of listening and speaking anxieties in language classroom environment.