The Relationship between EFL Students’ Self-Esteem and their Speaking Fluency The Case of Third Year Students in the Department of English at the University of Tébessa

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to explore the level of self-esteem and utterance fluency, and to test the correlation between these two research variables among all the 3rd year students at the department of English of Larbi Tébessi University. To this end, two instruments are used to collect the data. A questionnaire that covers five domains of self esteem (physical appearance, scholastic competence, social acceptance, close relationship, and global selfworth) is submitted to all 3rd year students (62 students) , and a speaking test to collect data about all the aspects of utterance fluency (speech rate, number of repetitions and correction words, number of filled and unfilled pauses, and number of false starts) in which the response rate was limited to only 50% because some of the students refused to be recorded while speaking. To analyze the collected data, two methods are adopted, which are descriptive and correlative analysis. The results indicate that 3rd year students have moderate level of selfesteem and utterance fluency. They also show that there is no significant positive correlation between self-esteem and speaking fluency. But there is a negative significant correlation between scholastic competence domain of self esteem and number of repetition words, and between the domain of social acceptance and number of false starts.