Students’ Difficulties Students’ Interests, Difficulties, and Capabilities

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2. Difficulties in Speaking

First, the students did not know how to start the conversations, what to say in English, and how to arrange the sentences spontaneously. Second, they felt nervous and shy to speak in front of the class. Therefore, they would easily forget what they had prepared to say. Third, they felt afraid of making mistakes, could not speak fluently in front of the class, and became a target of joke.

3. Difficulties in Writing

First, the students felt that writing was very complicated because it involved not only writing skills but also the vocabulary and grammar knowledge. Second, they found difficulties to arrange words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs based on their own ideas. Third, they often made misspelling in writing. It happened because they felt difficult to memorize the words. Besides, in English, word sounds were different from the spelling. Fourth, they could not directly translate words or sentences from Bahasa Indonesia into English.

4. Difficulties in Grammar

First, the students felt that grammar was very complicated because they had to memorize and understand the rules. Second, they could not understand why they had to speak based on certain rules tenses, sentence structures, or type of verbs. Third, they could not or did not know how to apply the rules in real practice because they only memorized the rules. However, capacity of their memory was limited so that they could not memorize all of them.

5. Difficulties in Vocabulary

First, the students mastered limited vocabulary because they found difficulties to memorize the spelling of the words. They also found difficulties to 87 understand the meaning of the words. Second, they could not differentiate between verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. They felt difficult to understand the concept although in Bahasa Indonesia course they had learned about it.

6. Difficulties in Pronunciation

First, the students were not used to practice their mouth to pronounce English sounds. Therefore, they felt weird to pronounce certain words in English. They also felt shy to practice their pronunciation. Second, they could not or did not know how to pronounce certain English sounds that they could not find in Bahasa Indonesia , such as the sounds æ in „cat‟, θ in „think, or dʒ in „large‟.

c. Students’ Capabilities

Here, students‟ capabilities refer to two categories, capabilities to overcome difficulties in listening to or reading English stories and capabilities to get an access to a computer or a laptop and internet. First, the researcher identified the students‟ capabilities to overcome difficulties in listening to or reading English stories based on the result of question number twelve. From the question, the researcher found that the students had some alternatives to overcome their difficulties. Most of them 79.2 mentioned that opening dictionary was the first alternative that they would choose. The second alternative 64.3 was asking the English teacher. The third alternative 56.6 was asking their friends. However, when the researcher compared the answers with the result of the classroom observations, the researcher found that, in real practice, the students did not use dictionary as the first alternative. The first alternative that they chose was asking their English teacher and friends. The reason was because they needed much time to look up in the dictionary. Besides, they were not sure with the