Exploring Senior High School Students' Strategies to Achieve A Good Command of English Speaking Skill: A Narrative Study
Abstract
Being able to speak English fluently, correctly, and appropriately for EFL
learners in Indonesia is a big challenge. It is because some factors are causing
EFL learners to experience difficulties in achieving speaking skills, those are the
environment, and students get minimum exposure of English. Externally, the
environment does not support EFL students to achive good speaking skills
because in a foreign language context, students only use English in the classroom,
while out of the classroom, students back to use Indonesian language or their
mothertongue to communicate with the people in their environment. In addition,
EFL students get minimum exposures of English compared to the ESL students.
ESL students tend to use their English widely when they communicate with the
people in their environment, such as when they go to the supermarket, train
station, or many other places. Even though EFL learners do not receive enough
exposure to English from the teacher, in this era it is not difficult for them to find
learning resources on the internet. Based on the writer‟s experiences, not all EFL
students are fluent to speak English. Some of them are capable to speak fluently,
different from the others, even though all of them have studied English for the
same time. Their achievement in speaking depends on how their strategies in
achieving it. This study investigated how learning strategies used by senior high
school students acuiring a good command of English help and develop them to be
good speakers of English.
The present study employed narrative study design that focuses on
collecting data by compiling students‟ stories of how they achieve good English
speaking skills, reporting individual experiences, and discussing the meaning
revealed from the experiences. The data were obtained by semi-structured
interview that was conducted face-to-face towards two students of one of a senior
high schools in Jember. The interview data were analyzed by performing a
thematic analysis proposed by Braun and Clark (2006). The steps included
familiarization with data, producing initial codes, using the existing codes to
search the themes, reviewing identified themes, generating and naming the
themes, and constructing the final report.
The result of the analysis found out five themes: (1) Memorization
strategies, (2) Cognitive strategies, (3) Metacognitive strategies, (4) Affective
strategies, and (5) Social strategies. The findings indicated that memorization
strategies are effective for the students to memorize expressions, words, and
pronunciation in English. In addition, cognitive strategies are strategies that help
them practice their pronunciation and grammar. Note-taking is also used to help
them remembering words easily. Meanwhile, metacognitive strategies help the
students understand the meaning easily. Furthermore, affective strategies help
them control their emotions while speaking. Social strategies relate to peers who
help students using their English for communication. It also helps them in
exploring the cultural norms of where the language comes from. Based on the data
above, most of the strategies used by the students are memorization strategies,
cognitive strategies, and social strategies. On the other hand, students have little
incentive to use metacognitive strategies and affective strategies.
The result of this research is expected to be able to give meaningful
contributions especially for the English teacher and the other researcher. the
teacher should provide learning activities where the students have more
opportunities to apply those five strategies. They have to be able to create creative
learning and follow up the designing techniques of teaching speaking relatively
employed by the good EFL students. The next studies need to observe the other
successful EFL students who gain their speaking skills at a different level of
education.