The Analysis of Speech Errors Used by Students in English Debate Class

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