Speaking issues faced by Indonesian students during classroom discussions in the US

Abstract

Without sufficient English-speaking skills, international students, including those from Indonesia, will face fundamental issues in their studies, especially in classroom discussions. A descriptive study was conducted to describe the issues faced by Indonesian students during classroom discussions in a mid-western US university. These issues were viewed from the perspective of internal factors such as linguistic knowledge, motivation, anxiety, and topic knowledge. Specifically, this study employed a convergent mixed-methods design. The 20 international students participating in this study were majoring in different disciplines and were selected using a purposive sampling technique. This study collected data using online questionnaires, consisting of 23 close-ended items, followed by semi-structured interviews with five willing participants. The quantitative data (online questionnaires) were put through a descriptive statistics analysis, while the qualitative data (semi-structured interviews) were studied using the content analysis technique. The findings showed that, in general, these Indonesian students had issues regarding correct grammar use and proper vocabulary choice during classroom discussions. They also experienced anxiety when participating in classroom discussions. Nevertheless, they did not have such issues in pronunciation, motivation, and topic knowledge. Based on the results mentioned above, possible implications for ESL/EFL are also discussed in this study.