Abstract:
The majority of undergraduates in Sri Lankan universities discover speaking skills to be the
greatest challenge for them in terms of second language acquisition for they have not been
provided sufficient opportunities to improve their oral production in their secondary schools due
to pragmatic difficulties such as time limitation and size of the class. Thus, though they are
clearly cognizant of the significance of English at present, they are reluctant to speak the
language, enfeebled by the fear of negative evaluation, communication apprehension, anxiety,
etc. This specific study intended to explore realistic strategies to remedy this unhealthy situation
as the manipulation of linguistic and semantic rules will be rather useless without fulfilling the
major purpose of a language, namely, communication. In order to accumulate data for this
qualitative study, interviews and questionnaires were administered to undergraduates and
lecturers from five universities in Sri Lanka along with participant observation. The study
revealed that English speaking phobia can be effectively overcome by encouraging learners to
learn through trial and error, implementing interesting task-based activities with increased
opportunities for extensive oral production, promoting critical-thinking skills, and building an
emotional attachment between learners and teachers by which learners can rely on teachers for
their resilience, constant assistance, and guidance throughout the painstaking process.
Furthermore, creating a non-defensive English-speaking environment with pre-planned
language boosting punishments for those who do not speak English can ensure the consistency
of their use of target language.
