How Can They Speak English Better Than Others?”; The Experience of Indonesian EFL Learners

Abstract

Along with English as Lingua Franca, English becomes important to master. In Indonesia which is a non-native English country, learning English becomes quite complicated. Sometimes people think it is indispensable, and sometimes it is not. However, mostly Indonesian think that learning English is hard. They may do not know how to make learning English easy. Even though, learning English will be easy if they understand the learning strategies. Then, to straighten that understanding the researcher conducted this study. This study focuses on analyzing the experience of successful English students at Unisma in learning speaking skills. The object of this study was the experience of three participants in the second, third, and fourth year of Unisma. They are the successful English learners selected by the purposive sampling method. This study uses qualitative inquiry design because it is the appropriate design to explore deeper the learning strategies that ware helped the participants in enhancing their speaking skills. Further, the research was conducted in a semistructured interview, then the data is recorded and transcribed. The result was checked using the methodological triangulation technique to maintain the credibility of the data. The result shows that most of them used all the learning strategies, but they have a dominant strategy that is always employed by them. It was proved from their stories that they mostly were dominant at metacognitive in indirect strategy and cognitive in indirect strategy. Successful language learners practice what they have learned with their own preferred learning method and style. They are flexible and do not stick to one set of strategies. Further, each learner has a choice of strategies that are used more dominantly than other strategies. That is because every person has their own obstacle faced in the learning process. It was suggested for the English learners to understand well how to apply learning strategies in every situation. The researcher wrote this study so that the language learners can learn from the participants’ experience. Further, the researcher also can conduct similar research about successful learners’ learning strategies in other skills.