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teachers should be aware of the existence of silent students during the class lesson and try to give more chances to speak with motivating words because silence is a
serious obstacle for achieving fluency in spoken English. Through reading previous study, I could see what kind of study has done, and also I could predict and prepare
the research process.
C. The Study
1. Context of the study
The context of this study is Satya Wacana Junior High School was selected because I once had teaching practicum in this Junior High School. Satya Wacana
Junior High School is one of the private schools with around 200 students, each grade has 3 classes and each class has 22 to 25 students. For English lesson, there are two
English teachers. Teacher A has been teaching for 15 years and teacher B has been t
eaching for 7 years. The English book that the teachers use is ‘When English Rings a Bell
’ for 7
th
grade students and ‘English in Focus’ for 8
th
grade students. Furthermore, English for SMP LAB students has 5 meetings in a week, 3 meetings for integrated
course and 2 meetings for listening and speaking class. The listening and speaking classes were conducted in a language laboratory. Also, SMP LAB has a library which
is shared with SMA LAB and it has more than 500 books that students can read to extend their reading comprehension and vocabularies. Moreover, when the teachers
prepare the video or music is related with material, they are able to use the meeting
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room which has the place for projector. From my observation and teaching experience during teaching practice in SMP LAB, I observed that there were various
types of students. Some students were very shy and less confident, whereas some others were very confident that they always wanted to answer any question. They also
had various reasons for learning English or not wanting to study English. Some students wanted to study English because they liked it but some students did not want
to study English because students also had different background knowledge: Students from international elementary school had higher English competence. The students
from private school had had English class but they still use bilingual system when the teacher taught the students. The students from government school had not English
class; they did not have much English background knowledge. Moreover, there were so many factors that the teacher should be aware with those difficulties.
2. Method of research
This study described the teachers’ perception of their difficulties of teaching
English in SMP LAB. This study used a descriptive research. The descriptive research refers to the type of research question, design, and data analysis that is
applied to a given topic. Three main purposes of research are to describe, explain, and validate findings. Moreover, description emerges the findings in order to fit them
with explanations, and then test to validate those explanations Krathwohl, 1993. This study investigated the following question,
“What is the teachers’ perception of their difficulties of teaching English in Satya Wacana Christian Junior high school?
”
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3. Participants
Two English teachers in Satya Wacana Christian junior high school were the participants in this study. The first participant has been teaching for 15 years in this
junior high school and she teaches 7 and 9 graders. The second participant has been teaching for 7 years in this school and she teaches 8 and 9 graders. To choose the
participants, the purposive sampling technique was used. They have taught students for more than 7 years which means that they must have had enough experience in
teaching junior high school students especially 7
th
and 8
th
grader. Furthermore, they must have had different criteria for teaching students.
4. Research instrument
In this study, semi-structured interview was used to collect the data. A semi- structured interview has greater flexibility for the participant to change the order of
the questions to provide opportunity for follow up questions Patton, 1990. The interview questions were conducted to collect information about the teaching
difficulties that most frequently appeared in school. Ten interview questions about teaching difficulties were used. Participants were interviewed twice individually.
Each of interviews took around 20 minutes. A recording device, a Smartphone, was used during interview to record the data.
5. Data collection procedure
The data collection for this study started in January, for 3 weeks. The interviews were conducted as follows:
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Two English teachers in Satya Wacana Christian junior high school were interviewed. It was about how the participants overcome the difficulties that most
frequently appeared in the classroom in Junior high school. And also, participants shared other difficulties. During the interview, the questions and answers were
flexibly changed in order to get richer data. Moreover, a recording device was used in order not to forget the important aspects from the interview. Note taking was also
used to record important ideas. 6.
Data analysis procedure The data of interview was analyzed in three steps such as transcribing, coding,
and categorizing. Based on the focus of the research, the data were coded and categorized into one group. There were two categories of teaching difficulties;
students ’ different background knowledge, student’s lack of motivation. The last step
was drawing a conclusion.
D. Finding and discussion
