The aims of this study were (1) to find out the difficulties that teachers’ faced in teaching English for junior high school students, (2) to elaborate the strategies teachers used to cope with their difficulties. This study used qualitative research as the research design. The subject of this study were six teachers from three different junior high school in Tegal Central Java, Indonesia. The data were collected by using interview. The technique of analyzing the data used in this research was the interactive model of qualitative data analysis by Miles and Huberman (2014). There were two points concluded based on this result of this study. First, the factors that cause difficulties in teaching English were students’ interest, duration or time allotment, students’ English skill, limited resource and equipment, technological limitation and parent’s support. Second, the strategies employed by teachers to overcome difficulties were diverse teaching methods, utilization of technology, classroom management and encouraging independent learning.

Keywords: Teachers’ difficulties, teaching English, teaching junior high school