In learning English as a foreign language, English Education Department Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta lecturers are favored to encourage students to master four skills namely listening, speaking, reading and writing. One of those skills is speaking skill. EED UMY lecturers are obligated to encourage the students to speak English. Therefore, the lecturers applied various strategies to accomplish this goal. This study aimed to find out the lecturers’ strategies to encourage the students to speak English. Also, this study tried to find out the challenges faced by lecturers in applying the strategies to encourage students to speak English. This study used qualitative method and descriptive qualitative research design. The researcher chose interview as the way to gather the data. There were three lecturers of EED UMY who were selected to be the research participants. In analyzing the data, the researcher used three types of coding. As a result, this study found that there were eight lecturers’ strategies to encourage students to speak English in EED UMY. They were role-play, simulation, storytelling, brainstorming, interview, speech, presentation and debate. In addition, this study also found some challenges when lecturers applying those strategies. They were classroom management, students’ lack of vocabularies, limited of times and students’ anxiety.