Junior High School Students’ Internal and External Problems in Speaking: A Preliminary Study of Implementing Shadowing Technique to Improve Students’ Speaking Skills

This study was aimed to investigate the internal and external problems faced by the Junior High School Students in one of the schools in Indonesia. The sample in this study was the eighth grade students having low ability in Speaking. This research was a qualitative study using purposive sample. In collecting the qualitative data, the researchers did observation, interview and distributed questionnaire. This study revealed some findings related to the students’ low ability in speaking. There were some internal problems which come from the students, they were 1) the low motivation in learning English; 2) the difficulty to choose the appropriate words in oral; 3) the difficulty to pronounce English words correctly; 4) the difficulty to arrange words in the appropriate order; 5) the difficulty to use sentences in appropriate grammar in oral communication; 6) The tendency to be passive learners in classroom activities; and 7) the students’ low confidence in speaking. Meanwhile, the external problems come from the teacher and class situation, they were 1) the teacher didn’t use alternative methods and techniques in teaching learning process: 2) the classroom activities tended to be teacher centered; 3) the teacher only used the text book as the teaching material provided by the; 4) there was a low interaction between students and teacher; 5) the students didn’t enjoy speaking activities; 3) only few students participated in the learning process actively. Concerning with those problems, the researchers would like to offer an alternative technique of learning speaking skill, i.e. digital based English input provision. This technique is also called shadowing technique which was originally developed as a training technique.