Stalled at A2 Low: Speaking Attainment and Teacher-Perceived Barriers in the CEFR-Aligned Malaysian Primary ESL Classroom

Malaysia's CEFR-aligned curriculum benchmarks Year 5 English to level A2 Low, whose defining achievement in speaking is the move from the isolated utterance to connected, extended talk. Whether pupils reach it, and what prevents those who do not, has been examined only indirectly: Malaysian research has documented speaking barriers extensively and scrutinised CEFR implementation closely, but the two literatures have not been brought into contact, and neither reports curriculum-referenced attainment. This study addresses that gap. Speaking Band records for 245 Year 5 pupils were analysed descriptively alongside a thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke's six-phase procedure, of open-ended responses from the 19 primary ESL teachers responsible for that cohort. The attainment distribution proved sharply compressed: 69.8% of pupils were placed at Bands 3 and 4, 20.4% at Bands 1 and 2, and only 9.8% at Bands 5 and 6, with three pupils (1.2%) reaching the highest level. Thematic analysis yielded five themes, dominated by affective barriers (47.4% of respondents) and limited lexical resource (42.1%). Integration through the curriculum's own descriptors proved analytically decisive: the Band 4 to 5 boundary is defined not by accuracy, range or pronunciation but by whether a pupil sustains communication at times or most of the time. The cohort has therefore stalled precisely where volitional extended speech becomes the criterion, the capacity that teacher-reported anxiety most directly suppresses. The study proposes that this plateau is maintained by a self-reinforcing cycle linking limited vocabulary, fear of peer evaluation and avoidance of extended talk, and identifies a diagnosis-remedy gap: teachers named affective barriers most often (47.4%) but affective remedies least often (5.3%). While 63.2% conceptualised technology as a source of authentic input, only one identified its capacity to remove the peer audience, an underexploited affordance in the dimension teachers identify as most limiting.

CEFR; speaking proficiency; primary ESL; foreign language anxiety; classroom-based assessment

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