Speaking+ Speaking+
Get started
explainer 4 min read

why is public speaking important for students

Public speaking matters for students because anxiety about being watched and judged while speaking can spill over into how well they perform academically. When students dread speaking up, they often hold back in class, so the people evaluating them see less of what they actually know. Take Maya, a twenty-year-old student who has studied the material thoroughly but freezes when she is asked to contribute in front of others. Because speaking feels risky to her, she avoids raising her hand and skips presentations. The result is a gap between what she knows and what her teachers can observe, and that gap shows up in her grades, not because she lacks ability, but because anxiety keeps her knowledge hidden. A useful limitation tempers this explanation: the research behind it is correlational. Studies find that students with higher public speaking anxiety tend to have lower academic performance, and fear of negative evaluation also correlates with weaker results, but correlation alone cannot prove that anxiety causes the lower grades. It is possible that struggling academically feeds the anxiety instead, or that a third factor influences both. The pattern is a strong, plausible link worth taking seriously, not a settled cause-and-effect chain.

A closer look

Speaking is how students show and test what they know, so anxiety about speaking can carry into academics. A student who dreads being judged holds back.

Say Maya, twenty, knows the material but freezes when asked to contribute. She avoids raising her hand, so the teacher never hears what she knows.

What one study found

When a seminar asks Maya to present, the trouble begins. She is twenty, she knows the material, yet standing up in front of the literature course flips a switch: her stomach tightens, she rehearses every sentence in her head, and she imagines her classmates judging each stumble. Because the dread takes up so much of her attention, she speeds up, drops her voice, and the teacher never hears the main point she prepared so well. That is the causal link in miniature: speaking anxiety crowds out the working memory she needs to organise and deliver her ideas, so the knowledge she holds never reaches the audience, and her performance on the task suffers.

The same mechanism scales up. If presenting counts toward her grade and group discussion shapes her participation, each anxious moment costs marks she was otherwise capable of earning. So comfort with public speaking is not a separate skill sitting beside her studies; it is the channel through which her studies get expressed and assessed.

There is a limit to how far this explanation can be pushed. Anxiety and weaker performance travel together, but a pattern like Maya's cannot prove which one drives the other. Maybe the anxiety drags the grades down, or maybe struggling academically makes every presentation feel riskier, or some third factor feeds both. What is safe to say is that the connection is real enough that ignoring it means ignoring a genuine barrier between what Maya knows and what her teachers can see.

One study of students aged 18 to 25 found that higher public speaking anxiety went hand in hand with lower academic performance. So Maya's pattern of dreading presentations and her grades travel together, even though the study cannot say which one drives the other.

Because presentations count toward her grade, the anxiety does not stay outside the classroom. Maya rushes through her slides, skips the discussion questions she actually understands, and earns less credit than her knowledge suggests. Speaking is how the course samples what she knows, so a shaky sample produces a shaky result.

The same fear also quietly closes other channels. She stops asking questions when a reading confuses her, because asking feels like announcing a weakness. So she misses chances to test her understanding and correct it, and small gaps survive until they surface in essays or exams.

What this does not prove

The main limit is that the study cannot tell us what causes what. It was correlational, which means researchers only measured anxiety and grades at the same time, and they used a convenience sample, so the students were not chosen to represent all learners.

Because of that design, the anxiety-to-grades story is one possibility among several. Students like Maya might struggle academically first, then grow anxious about speaking because they already feel exposed. A third factor, such as general stress or fewer study hours, could also drive both.

The proposed pathway through fear of negative evaluation was not supported in this sample, either. Anxiety did correlate with lower grades, but the indirect effect through that mediator came out insignificant, so the fear of being judged explains the link idea did not hold up here.

So the honest reading is narrower than the headline. A future study that follows students over time, or tests an actual speaking intervention, would be needed before anyone could claim that better speaking causes better grades.

Keep reading

All articles

explainer

why are speeches important

**Informative speaking equips communities to decide.** A community has to understand an issue before it can choose what to do about it, so someone has to supply that shared understanding first. Informative speaking does that job: it draws attention to a public concern, presents reliable information from credible sources, and helps people make sense of it together. Because it is educational, it typically comes before any solution is picked or advocated, not after. Picture a town meeting about water safety. A speaker explains what a contaminant is, where it likely came from, and what the testing numbers mean, all in plain language. Only after residents understand those basics can they reasonably weigh the real options, so the informative part of the speech is what makes the later decision possible. The same pattern explains why informative speaking helps people participate in civic concerns more confidently and actively: understanding comes first, and confidence in taking part follows from it. One limit to keep in mind: this reason applies mainly to informative and civic speaking, and the link between good information and better decisions is an argument rather than a tested result. A speech can also inform badly, leaving a confused audience no closer to a sound decision. Try applying this to a new scenario: imagine a neighborhood meeting about a proposed bike lane. **Which part of the speech has to come first, and why?** - **Good answer:** The informative part, explaining traffic patterns and how other cities' lanes worked, because the community needs to understand the issue before it can select a solution. - **Weak answer:** Advocating for or against the lane right away, because deciding or persuading before people understand the issue leaves them unable to weigh the options. To see how informative and deliberative speeches differ in what they owe an audience, continue with the section on **deliberative speaking**.

explainer

why is speech important

Plain-language causal explainer: why speech matters as a form of human communication. Uses the cooperative turn-taking mechanism, one worked case, and an evidence-based limitation.

explainer

why small talk is important

Small talk matters because it builds rapport, so people feel safer together. When you swap a few light words with someone, you turn a stranger into a familiar face, and that familiarity lowers the guard we all carry in new interactions. It works a bit like a key that does not open the whole house but gets you through the front door. Once that door is open, the deeper conversation that follows becomes much easier to start. A study by Andrew Guydish and Jean Fox Tree shows this mechanism in action. In a videoconferenced task, pairs who made small talk during breaks reported greater enjoyment and a stronger willingness to collaborate again than pairs who stayed silent. Most strikingly, they were about 3.5 times more likely to keep talking once the task itself ended. The light exchanges during the breaks did not replace the real work of the conversation; they warmed up the pair so that continuing felt natural rather than forced. There is a clear boundary here. Small talk alone has not been shown to boost happiness. Research by Matthias Mehl and colleagues found no evidence that more shallow interaction by itself lifts well-being; what matters is the meaningful engagement it can lead into. Mehl described small talk as the inactive ingredient in a pill, the part that helps the active ingredients work. So the value of small talk lies in what it makes possible: rapport now, and a path to real connection later.

explainer

why listening skill is important

This lesson explains why listening matters so much for learning English: new language comes in through what we hear, and what we hear only helps us learn when we mostly understand it. When speech sits just beyond our current level, the words we already know give us enough context to work out the new ones, so each listen quietly adds vocabulary and grammar without any memorising. When speech is far too difficult, the opposite happens: attention gets used up just decoding the sounds, and little is left for actually picking up new language. The lesson walks through one learner's example of inferring an unfamiliar word from familiar surroundings to show this mechanism in action, and it also names an honest limit: much of the supporting research was done with reading, so the exact difficulty level where listening stops paying off is less firmly established.

routine

how to strengthen your voice for speaking

Practice session that builds vocal strength through breath support, posture, and a short warm-up loop with a self-check.

routine

how to strengthen voice speaking

This article gives a short practice routine using breath support, projection, and pacing to make your spoken English voice sound stronger.