English Speaking Learning Problems Faced by Vocational School Students

The purpose of this study was to discover the students’ problems in speaking
skills. This study was conducted at SMK Swasta Dwiwarna Medan. The subject
of this study were 23 eleventh grade students of office administration and an
English teacher that were chosen by using purposive sampling technique. A
descriptive qualitative design was used in this study. The data collection was done
by distributing the questionnaire. There were 25 items of questionnaire about
speaking problems that divided into 2 main aspects; linguistic and psychological
problems. Linguistic problems are the problems related to students’ grammar,
vocabulary, and pronunciation problems. While the psychological problems are
the students’ problems regarding to fear of mistake, shyness, anxiety, lack of selfconfidence
and lack of motivation. The results of questionnaire used to serve as
references in interviewing to obtain the valid information. Based on the findings
on students’ responses in the questionnaire, it can be concluded that the first
problems was the linguistic problems with lack of vocabulary (15,18%), the
second and the third were occupied by pshycological problems with fear of
mistake (15,18%) and lack of confidence (15,18%). For the whole of percentages,
psychological problems was the dominant problems faced by the students with
60,75% and linguistic problems with 39,24%. Some solutions were got through
the documents based on experts’ explanation from books, journal articles and
even theses.