An Analysis of Seventh Grade Students' English-Speaking Difficulties

Among the four language skills, speaking ability is one of the most crucial. It is believed to be an indicator of competency in a language. (Zulaikah, 2019) considers the speaking skill to be the most important of the four language abilities, and EFL students should master it. Sadly, most students learning English as a foreign language are good at reading and writing, but they have difficulty in speaking (Karim, 2020). Hence, this research was to analyse the difficulty of speaking English. This research used a qualitative-descriptive research design. A total of 22 seventh-grade students were purposively selected and participated in this research. The researcher used two instruments to gather data: tests and questionnaires. The findings show that the speaking difficulties faced by the students are classified into two types: psychological and linguistic. Psychological difficulty includes a lack of motivation, a lack of confidence, hesitancy and fear of being wrong when speaking, and the perception that speaking English is difficult. Linguistic difficulty includes a lack of vocabulary, pronunciation errors, and poor grammar proficiency. Besides, students were also affected by the following factors when they tried to speak English: First, 41% are inhibition; 23% are nothing to say; 18% speak Javanese; 14% prefer silence; and 4% have poor listening ability. Keywords: Speaking difficulty, Factors affecting speaking fluency