Speaking Difficulties Experienced By English for Foreign Language at The Eleventh-Grade Students

Abstract

Speaking is the main skill that must be mastered in learning English. With it we can communicate ideas, thoughts, opinions and feelings. To establish good communication, students must master good speaking skills as well. This research make it different from other research because it covers more than one aspect and the researcher tries to see it from different points of view. This way makes the findings of this research vary. This research aims to find the students’ difficulties and the factors affecting their difficulties in learning speaking English at the eleventh-grade students of SMAN 6 Banjarmasin. The researcher used a qualitative approach with the descriptive method. To get more top to bottom data about their difficulties and the factors affecting their difficulties in learning to speak English, face to face individual interview was conducted in this research. The researcher found the students’ difficulties in learning speaking English were divided into linguistic and non-linguistic difficulties. There are some linguistics difficulties encountered by the students in learning to speak English, such as lack of vocabulary, lack of grammar and pronunciation. While, non-linguistics difficulties were inhibition, nothing to say, low or uneven participation and mother tongue use. Second, the factors affecting their difficulties in speaking English were lack of practice, lack of speaking components which made them less confident, students’ regard English as a difficult subject to learn, lack of support to use English, cognitive styles and lack of motivation to learn English (extrinsic and intrinsic motivation). It tends to be reasoned that each factor can cause a few difficulties, or a difficulty can be influenced by various factors.