Self-esteem and its Relationship to English Oral Performance among Yemeni EFL Undergraduate Learners

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the level of self-esteem among the Yemeni EFL university students and find out whether female and male significantly vary in their self-esteem. It also examines the level of the Yemeni Arabic speaking EFL university students in English oral performance and its relationship with their self-esteem. For the data collection, three instruments have been used. First, 50 Yemeni EFL undergraduate students (female=38; male=12) completed the self-esteem scale (SES) developed by the researcher along with the standardized Self-esteem Scale by Rosenberg(1965). Then, an oral test was set to test students' performance in English speaking skill. The third tool is a spoken test checklist prepared to score the students’ oral performance. The data collected were statistically processed by using SPSS. The results obtained show that: (a) Yemeni EFL undergraduate learners show high self-esteem degree (M=2.90 (out of 5), percentage73%) in both dimensions (c) No significant differences have been found between females’ and males’ self-esteem, (d) There is a very slight difference between female and male towards their own perception towards themselves, but it is not significant, (e) The level of Yemeni EFL undergraduate learners in speaking skill is a bit low (M= 9.94 (out of 20); SD=2.4; percentage 49.4%), (f) There is a significant relationship between self-esteem and spoken performance by Yemeni EFL learners (r=.365, p-value=.009<0.01). As a whole, this study contributed to the ESL/EFL by providing information on Yemeni Arabic speaking undergraduate female and male EFL learners in terms of their self-esteem and their oral communication performance.