The aims of this research were to find out the students‟ speaking
competence and to find out the students‟ problems in speaking at the second grade
of SMK Negeri 3 Purwokerto. The design of this research was descriptive
quantitative. The population of this research was 401 students. The technique
sampling of this research was purposive sampling. The writer chose 72 students as
the sample. In this research the writer used a test to get the data. The result of the
computation showed that no students belonged to very bad and bad category.
There were 7 students belonged to very good category in speaking competence
(9.72 %), 59 students belonged to good category in speaking competence (81.94
%), and 6 students belonged to fair category in speaking competence (8.33%). So,
we concluded that most of the students‟ speaking competence belonged to good
category. The result of students‟ problems in speaking showed that 27.50 %
problems occurred in grammar, 25.83 % problems occurred in pronunciation,
25.14 % problems occurred in vocabulary, 25% problems occurred in
comprehension, and 24.44 % problems occurred in fluency.