Culture and language are interconnected when people communicate and interact. Language that is used in communication is conditioned based on the target culture. Therefore, learning foreign language makes the students aware of the importance of cross cultural understanding. Lack of cross cultural understanding causes the students to experience anxiety to communicate with foreigner. Anxiety is a barrier for the students to improve their language skills including speaking. This study investigates whether the students with cross cultural understanding are more confident in speaking and more able in managing their speaking anxiety. The participants were five university students, each of whom was invited to have a talk with one foreigner via zoom. Five foreigners were from Warsaw, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and Taiwan. The students arranged the schedule for the zoom meeting with the foreigner and provided some questions. The questionnaire and reflective writing were used to collect the data. The questionnaire was adapted from English Communication Anxiety Scale by Yang (2012) and Unwillingness to communicate (UCS) by Burgoon (1976). The questionnaire was distributed after and before the activities to know the level of students’ anxiety. In the last, the participants were asked to answer the open-ended essay questions to reflect on the talk that they have done. The reflective writing was conducted to find the difficulty that the students found during communicating with foreigners. The result showed that there is a decrease in the students’ anxiety level that is related to the students’ reflective writing.

Keywords: Anxiety, Cross-culture, Speaking