Psychological Barriers to Speaking Abilities of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Students at Global Village Sumbawa, Indonesia

Speaking is considered as one of the most fundamental skills which every student learning English aims at improving in order to be communicatively competent. Despite the outstanding effort of the encouragement made by teachers, the majority of the Indonesian students learning English still lack abilities to express ideas in a classroom regardless of their understanding about linguistic features of the target language. They also tend to defend themselves against producing utterances or expressing their ideas. Therefore, this study attempted to figure out what challenges which students encountered psychologically. It is a descriptive qualitative study and uses observation and interview as the methods for gathering data. The results then revealed that the students had difficulty actively speaking in the classroom because they were inhibited by anxiety, shyness, and lack of motivation. The study was finally expected to provide significant pedagogical implications for EFL teachers to raise their awareness of these issues in the EFL classrooms and to formulate applicable strategies to help their students cope with the obstacles.