Students’ problems in building arguments during debate in “SEGA Program” at UMS in 2018/2019 academic year

The objective of the study is to identify the difficulties faced by students in building arguments during debate in SEGA program in the 2018/2019 academic year. The participants were 24 third-semester students of English Education Department of Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta who joined the SEGA (Saturday English Gathering) program in 2018/2019 academic year. The data sources of this study were the students who became the debaters at SEGA final test and the process of debate in the final exam of SEGA. To achieve the aim, the researcher used observation and structured interview as the instruments to collect the data. Then, the observation was transformed into transcript and they were analyzed by AREL structure ( National Speech & Debate Association, 2009 ) using the descriptive qualitative method. To validate the data, this study used inter-rater reliability. The findings showed that there were 5 difficulties faced by the students in building their arguments during debate. Those structures were: the difficulty in comprehending the motion of debate (13%), the difficulty in making Reasoning (13%), the difficulty in finding the Evidence (58%), the lack of understanding the AREL structure (8%) and the lack of confidence (8%).