Page 21 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

5 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Development of Confidence in Speaking, Based on Learners’

Accumulated Experiences and Specific Tasks:

Language Students’ Perspective

Josué Cinto Morales

Silvia Yedith Pastén Hernández

Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla

Key Words: experience, self-assessment, self-confidence, self-regulation, speaking.

The low amount of production in speaking is very often related to the lack of self-confidence, defined
as the recognized capacity that learners possess about themselves to perform a task and achieve
their purposes, which results from the accumulation of previous successful experiences. Apparently,
confidence determines not just learners’ participation but also the quality of their production in class.
Those learners who hardly participate seem to have had limited successful experiences in expressing
opinions, arguments and other communicative attempts both fluently and accurately, which, in turn,
affect their attitudes towards taking risks. That is, they do not believe in their capacity to get engaged
in communicative interactions and negotiate meanings. Thus, many students’ limited participation
and speaking production seems to be related to their restricted opportunities to participate as well as
few successful experiences which otherwise could have contributed to the development of confident
speakers.

Accordingly, the objective of this research is to compare the development of confidence in language
learners with high participation rates and those who barely participate in their classes, based on the
following research questions:

How do participative and non-participative learners’ experiences differ?
What is their judgment about their capabilities for the accomplishment of goals like?

How does self-confidence affect students’ self-regulation and the development of speaking?

Literature Review

Speaking is defined as the aural/oral production which involves the systematic generation of verbal
utterances to express specific meaning (Bailey, 2005), based on coherence as a characteristic of
thought and the principle to systematically link one to the others (Sheppard,2005), and a high level of
confidence to get engaged in the negotiation of meaning (Bygate, 1993).

Bjork (1994) mentions that “self-confidence is the judgment about capabilities for the accomplish-
ment of a goal, and, therefore, must be considered motivation that provides the goal context” (p.173),
understanding that motivation is composed of two elements: “goal choice and self-regulation” (Kan-