Speech anxiety of elementary school students

The purpose of this research is to determine the speech anxiety levels of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students of elementary schools. Also, existence of any significant differentiation -dependent to some parameters -between speech anxiety levels of students is investigated. The sample of research is consist of 626 students from 6th, 7th, and 8th grades of 10 different elementary schools that belong to different socio-economical classes at Uşak city centrum in 2014-2015 education period. 268 of students are male and 358 of them are female. To evaluate the speech anxiety of students, a five point likert type "Speech Anxiety Scale" is used by the researcher. Questions of the scale are comprised of 23 items. Beside, a "Personal Information Form" is used by the researcher to obtain certain information about students. The information acquired from the research is analyzed by SPSS Windows 22.0. For evaluation of the data; numbers, percentage, average, and standart deviation are used as definitive statistical methods. The t-test is used to compare quantitative continous data between two independent groups. The one-way Anova test is used to compare quantitative continous data among more than two independent groups. After Anova test, Scheffe test is used as complementary post-hoc analysis to designate differentations.Pearson correlation analysis is used among the continuous variables of the research.The obtained findings are evaluated at %95 confidence interval and %5 significance level. As the result of the research, speech anxiety levels of the students are determined as weak for the speech anxiety at immediate vicinty, medium for the speech anxiety during class, weak for the extracurricular speech anxiety at school, and weak for speech anxiety in general. It is discovered that there is a statistically significant difference between parameters of mother's educational level, fathers educational level, mother's occupation, father's occupation, level of family income, number of siblings, any undergone important disease, possesing own room and general speech anxiety. Any statistically significant difference is not discovered between students' genereal speech anxiety and parameters of gender, social class, family togatherness, existing of mother, existing of father, count of people living in the house, and having a continous disease. Keywords: Speech anxiety, anxiety, fear, elemantary school students