What remains from the past: a meta analysis of Indonesian students' problems in English speaking

Despite commonly being seen as the indicator of success in learning English, speaking remains a challenge for students in the EFL context. This research aims to find out more about what problems students often experience in learning to speak English. This research used a meta-analysis method where 40 sources of data from books, theses, and journal articles from the year 2014 to 2023 were used as data collection. The results showed that there are still many students who have speaking problems which vary into four major factors, namely psychological problems, language problems, skills problems, and environmental problems. Psychological problems are the most experienced problems by students where these problems are divided into three aspects, first is an emotional aspect with the total of problems are anxiety (15), inhibition (12), fear of making mistakes (17), lack of self-confidence (21), nervousness (5), fear of negative reactions (2), difficulty in speaking (2), and feelings of discomfort (1), second is habitual aspect it is caused by lack of ideas (3), lack of understanding (4), and interference of the mother tongue (18), the third is interest aspect such as lacks insight into English (2), nothing to say (9), and lack of motivation (21). Language problems such as lack of vocabulary mastery (28) and lack of grammatical mastery (21) where these problems are the main problems in learning English speaking. Skill problems are about students’ ability in fluency (3) and pronunciation (24) these problems also remain as the hardest aspect in mastering speaking skills, and the last is environmental problems which are also divided into three different aspects, first is the teacher aspect such as low performance (1), inappropriate teacher strategies (1), limited time (1), and lack of opportunity (3), second is students aspect such as lack of interaction (2), lack of speaking practice (6), and low participant (7), third is another aspect like big class (2). Even though there have been various solutions provided, these various problems are still often experienced by some Indonesian students when learning to speak English in class.