The Strategies of Indonesian Junior High School Students in Learning Listening Skill

Abstract

The present study addresses three objectives: 1) identifying the intensity of strategies use in learning listening, 2) investigating the inter-correlation among the strategies deployment, and 3) describing how significantly successful and less successful learners differ in the use of strategies. The accessible subjects were two hundred and fifty seven students at seventh and eighth grade of junior high school in Malang, Indonesia. They were required to complete 50 items strategies questionnaire of learning listening taken from Oxford strategy taxonomy. They are memory strategies, cognitive strategies, compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social strategies. The statistical result utilizing SPSS 15 indicated that the overall strategies use were at moderate level, compensation strategies were taken as the most frequent and social strategies were used at the least frequent. Then the intercorrelation among the use of strategies showed that some of the strategies interrelated positively and significantly, while some others were not correlated. In relation to the strategies used by the two groups, the finding showed that both high achievers and low achievers were not significantly different in the applying strategies in learning listening skill. Introduction One of the essential skills to concern about is listening because listening to the first language seems to easily developed, but it needs great effort to understand the listening to foreign language (Chien and Wei, 1998). Bozorgian and Pillay (2013) argue that listening is a very first skill that every learner has in their early unconscious learning; furthermore, it is important as it is put in the foreign language classroom context. Chien and Wei (1998) further state that for the listening comprehension, the students need to have various uses of strategies that lead them to be successful learners because only the skilled students in using strategies can possess easily in the listening comprehension. The use of learning strategies could identify " successful language learners who use a wide range of strategies that are most appropriate for their learning tasks " (Oxford, 1985). Emphasizing on the classroom activities, teachers should incorporate language learning strategy training in English lessons where it is ultimately can develop the students' language skills (Yang, 2007). There have been a great number of studies of the use of strategies in learning listening and its contribution to listening comprehension and proficiency that have been increasingly taken in the last few decades. Some of researchers investigated how strategy of learning could influence the learners' listening skill development. The first study was from Thomson and Rubin (1996) who find that implementing metacognitive and cognitive learning strategies for listening can result positively and significantly on the students' listening comprehension. Having been implemented 6 categories of Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), Li and Liu (2008) also attain positive result on the use of strategies-based instruction in the students' listening comprehension. In different context, Shang (2008) examines the use of learning strategy by different proficiency levels of Taiwanese students on linguistic patterns of negative, functional, and contrary-to-fact statements. It was found that advanced learners deployed some strategies combination (memory, compensation and cognitive strategies) at most frequent on contrary-to-fact statements than beginner level students who highlighted the use on memory strategy on negative expression.