THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS’ USING STRUCTURED TIKTOK-BASED SPEAKING FEATURES AND THEIR LEVEL OF SPEAKING ANXIETY

Abstrak

The growing integration of social media platforms into language learning has encouraged educators and researchers to explore their potential for enhancing students’ speaking confidence and reducing anxiety. Among these platforms, TikTok has gained attention for its interactive and multimodal features that appear to offer low-pressure opportunities for oral practice. Despite these assumptions, limited empirical evidence exists regarding whether frequent engagement with TikTok’s speaking features is actually associated with measurable affective outcomes. This study therefore examined the relationship between university students’ frequency of using TikTok’s speaking-related features and their level of speaking anxiety in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Using a quantitative correlational design, data were collected from 55 students through two Likert-scale questionnaires assessing TikTok usage and speaking anxiety. Descriptive findings indicated moderate levels of both variables. However, Pearson and Spearman analyses showed no significant correlation between TikTok usage and speaking anxiety (r = –0.095, p = .489; ρ = –0.062, p = .653). These results suggest that frequent engagement with TikTok alone does not contribute to lower speaking anxiety. The study highlights that TikTok’s educational benefits depend on purposeful and guided pedagogical use rather than spontaneous, unstructured interaction. Future research is recommended to investigate feature-specific effects, examine the quality of learners’ engagement, and incorporate objective assessments of speaking performance.