Linguistic and Affective Barriers to Speaking among Yemeni EFL Second-Year Students: Evidence from a Conflict-Affected University Context

Abstract

Speaking is widely regarded as the most cognitively and socially demanding skill for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The specific linguistic and affective mechanisms that constrain it are still unevenly documented across global EFL contexts, and particularly so in Arabic-speaking, conflict-affected higher education systems. This study examined the speaking difficulties reported by second-year students in the Department of English, Faculty of Education, Thamar University, Yemen, interpreting them through an integrated framework combining Communicative Competence theory, Willingness to Communicate, and the Affective Filter/Foreign Language Anxiety construct. A 15-item, five-point Likert questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of 18 female second-year students (aged 21–25) using a quantitative, descriptive survey design, and responses were analyzed descriptively using SPSS. Limited vocabulary, unresolved grammatical accuracy, and inaccurate pronunciation emerged as the principal linguistic constraints on speaking. A distinct affective barrier also appeared, concentrated specifically around spontaneous, unplanned oral response, and it coexisted with uniformly high self-reported motivation. These results suggest that linguistic and affective barriers operate as partially independent mechanisms, not as a single underlying deficit, which qualifies prior accounts that treat motivation and competence as substitutable explanations of EFL speaking difficulty. The study contributes context-specific evidence from a war-affected, resource-constrained Arabic-speaking setting to a literature built predominantly on East and Southeast Asian populations. Transforming speaking pedagogy in such settings, the findings suggest, calls for pairing targeted linguistic instruction with structured, low-stakes opportunities for spontaneous oral practice; generalized motivational encouragement alone is unlikely to be enough. Because the sample was small, single-sex, and confined to one institution, the findings are best read as transferable, theory-generating evidence, not as statistically generalizable claims, and the study calls for larger, comparative, mixed-methods research across Yemeni and regional EFL programmes undergoing similar structural change.