Research on English-speaking anxiety in Bangladesh has commonly treated it as a binary difference between students who come from the Bangla-medium and the English-medium schools. The current study uses a positive-deviance perspective to investigate differences within the Bangla-medium group. Ninety-two undergraduate students from four Bangladeshi universities completed a 27-item adapted Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and open-ended questions; 77 of whom came through the Bangla-medium schools. Of the variables examined, only perceived proficiency differentiated participants with lower and higher anxiety, although this result should be interpreted carefully because both measures were self-reported. The Bangla-medium students answered along the whole scale, from high to very little anxiety, justifying the need to stop treating it as a single group with no variation. Analysis of written responses indicated that high-anxiety participants mainly associated their anxiety with classroom-based academic activities. In contrast, lower-anxiety participants more often referred to settings beyond the classroom and described their previous schooling as influencing, in many cases positively, their spoken English. Low-anxiety Bangla-medium students reported anxiety levels similar to those of the English-medium comparison group. These atypical cases suggest that the medium of instruction alone is an insufficient indicator of student need, and that support should instead be guided by students’ perceptions of speaking English.