Understanding Students’ Learning Strategies as an Input Context to Design English Classroom Activities

Abstract

Learners’ individual differences in learning English as a foreign language with large-mixed ability classes needs a great attention in increasing their communicative language skills. One of Learners’ differences is learning strategies. Learning strategy has a great role to promote students’ autonomy. It is one of front liners in developing communicative skills of English. Understanding students’ learning strategies becomes a strategic and important issue to gain brilliant ideas to design classroom activities and then, to promote students’ autonomy. The study conducted with students in two senior high schools, SMA Negeri 15 and SMA Negeri 16 Makassar South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia found that students only used meta-cognitive strategies at a high frequency and memory, cognitive, compensation, affective, and social strategies at a medium frequency. In meta-cognitive strategies, students have several degrees of autonomy promotion by independently organizing and evaluating their learning progress, although other five learning strategies need intensively great efforts to support their autonomy. Further implications of the study in English foreign language teaching and learning in the context of implementing school based curriculum in Indonesia are also discussed.