English Writing Strategies Employed by Indonesian EFL Successful Learners at Department of English Universitas Negeri Malang

Language learning strategies play an important role in the process of English foreign language learning. Factors that influence the choice of learners’ strategies in language learning vary including motivation, gender, cultural background, attitudes and beliefs, types of task, age and L2 stage, learning styles, and tolerance of ambiguity. These factors have been examined as significant factors in the success of L2 learning (Oxford, 1990). Therefore, it is important to enhance our understanding on the students’ use of learning strategies. Hence, this study aims to identify writing strategies employed by successful Indonesian EFL students to provide further understanding on the issue of learning strategies in writing. To conduct the study, 50 students of Department of English whose grade for Paragraph Writing course is A were involved in this study. The students were from the Academic Year of 2016 majoring in English Language Teaching. To collect the data, a set of questionnaires consisting of 52 items were adapting and synthesizing questionnaire items used by Oxford (1990), Abdollahzadeh (2010), and Banker &Boonkit (2014).  The items were classified into six types of strategy categories as proposed by Oxford (1990), namely, memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, social, and aﬀective strategies. The findings have demonstrated that the successful learners’ use of writing strategies vary in terms of the average score. Metacognitive strategy has the highest average score, 3.9. It is followed by cognitive strategy and social strategy with the average score of 3.6 for each classified as high. Following those two strategies, affective strategy has the average score of 3.5 classified as high. In addition, compensation strategy and memory strategy have the average score of 3.4 and 3.0 respectively, classified as medium. The findings suggest that all writing strategies are employed by the students in writing. The students need to meet various aspects of writing and therefore they recourse to various writing strategies to attain such goals. Since writing strategies deal with students’ autonomy in learning, the findings of this study imply the students are supposed to be more aware of what strategies suit their particular needs and how to effectively use those strategies to achieve their learning goals. For future researchers, it is suggested that they investigate how the students’ use of writing strategies correlates with factors such as motivation, learning style, gender and so on. They are also suggested to investigate the use of the strategies among different groups of students in terms of the mentioned factors and compare the results. Normal 0 false false false IN X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:Table Normal;mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:;mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;mso-para-margin-top:0cm;mso-para-margin-right:0cm;mso-para-margin-bottom:8.0pt;mso-para-margin-left:0cm;line-height:107%;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Times New Roman;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:Times New Roman;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}