Coping with Learning to Speak English Among Senior High School Students

Abstract

Learning to speak English needs a great effort to make due to various linguistic aspects involved. It may deal with diction, pronunciation, sentence patterns, and grammar. Besides, the exposure to the target language, habbit formation and motivation play an important role. In senior high schools, speaking is one of the skills to be learned. However, learning to speak English among senior high school students is not satisfactory. The majority of students who have finished senior school cannot speak English. Meanwhile, the ability in English is judged by the capability of speaking English well. Once people can speak English fluently, people think that their English is good. Based on the observation in the classroom presentation, it was found out that the common problems of speaking English  that the senior high students often made were speaking slowly and taking too long to compose utterances, not being able to participate actively in conversation, having unnatural sounds of English, having poor grammar and pronunciation, not being able to sustain spoken interaction, often making breakdown communication and misunderstanding, lacking vocabulary needed to talk about common utterances, and lacking communication strategy as well. This paper is going to explore the real problems of learning speaking English among senior high school students, the probable causes of the problems, and some ways out to solve the problems.