THE DIFFICULTIES OF TEACHING SPEAKING FOR YOUNG LEARNERS

Abstract

Speaking is one of four skills that should be mastered by EFL students. However, there are several problems that teachers found while teaching speaking, especially for teaching young learners. The problems usually come from the students itself, but the teacher's method in teaching may cause a problem too. This paper is intended to share the teacher's difficulties in teaching speaking for young learners and the way to solve those problems. The methods that the writers use in this paper are descriptive research and literature research. The data was collected through a survey for elementary school teachers around Purwokerto, which are formal and non-formal schools. The finding shows that the teachers facing the same problems in teaching speaking, such as students can't remember the pronunciation and can't understand the materials well, the method that commonly used to teaching speaking, and teacher's suggestions on how to teach speaking better. This paper also provides some solutions that teachers can use to achieve the higher quality of teaching speaking especially for young learners and make students improve their skills in speaking. There are audio lingual method (ALM) and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in teaching speaking for young learners that expected to help solve those problems.