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.