Abstract:
The aim of this study were to describe the types of speech errors, the frequency of
errors, the dominant errors, and the causes of speech errors made by debaters in
English Debate Class. The type of this research was descriptive qualitative. The
twenty-four debaters in English Debate Class were the sources of the data. The
data were the utterances containing speech errors. The researcher founds nine
types of speech errors based on the theory of Clark and Clark (1977). There were
447 speech errors uttered by twenty-four debaters with the frequencies as follows:
Silent Pause (168 or 37.5%), repeats (167 or 37.3%), Filled Pause (74 or 16.5%),
Retraced False Start (12 or 2.6%), Un-retraced False Start (9 or 2%), Interjection
(8 or 1.7%), Slip of the Tongue (6 or 1.3%), Correction (2 or 0.4%), and Stutter
91 or 0.2%). The most dominant errors was silent pause. The errors produced by
debaters were caused by cognitive reason, anxiety and social reason. There were
many speech errors committed by twenty-four debaters which mean that debaters
need to increase their ability in conveying opinion smoothly and clearly
