Examining the relationship between fear of negative evaluation and communication strategies by Iranian IELTS candidates

In a social situation, when a person is exposed to unfamiliar people, they get nervous or self-conscious about being watched, judged or evaluated unfavorably by others. When students are speaking in an evaluation context such as English classroom, the impression they make is a central concern for them. Receiving negative feedback makes them more anxious. On the other hand, communication is one of the crucial skills that challenges every individual to some extent. However, in some situations where English learners face some sort of communicative deficiency, communication strategies (CSs) play a prominent role to overcome communicative problems. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between fear of negative evaluation (FNE) and communication strategies (CSs) among Iranian IELTS candidates. It was aimed to examine the differences in the use of communication strategies between speakers with high or low degree of fear of negative evaluation. The current study was a case study consisted of 10 English learners with advance level in MCI Language Institute in Mashhad, Iran. The participants scoring high or low on fear of negative evaluation were male and female and ranged in age from 20 to 27 with average of 23.FNE questionnaire developed by Watson and Friend (1969) was used for the purpose of understanding the degree of participants’ fear of negative evaluation. To investigate the type and frequency of communication strategies used by participants the class was observed for 20 sessions by the researcher. Data elicited from audio recordings of oral speaking tasks to identify communication strategies were used. The findings showed that the subjects employed ten types of communication strategies specified by Tarone (1980), Faerch and Kasper (1983), and clennell (1995). The most frequently employed communication strategy was restructuring and the least used strategy was tonicity. The findings showed that there was a significant relationship between fear of negative evaluation and communication strategies