As a foreign language teacher since 1980, quite often I am not satisfied not only with the insufficient results gained by the learners, but also with the quality of adolescent and adult learners starting or continuing their foreign language learning. And I found out from discussions with other language teachers and even with lecturers, that many of them share the same problem. Not rarely, we can hear complaints about the quality of university students in expressing their opinion, arguments and criticisms orally or written. This situation brought me to explore researches and studies about successful language learners and also to observe Indonesian students learning English in three Jakarta's high schools.
To a certain extent the causal factors are ineffective learning, which is caused by learning incompetence. The old learning tradition, and the "instructional" language teaching as an implication of quite an "instructional" curriculum, especially for secondary schools (curriculum 1975 and 1984 for SMA), somehow failed to bring the high school students to reach a higher stage of learners. The instructional characteristics can be identified through the "instructional" goals to be reached in language teaching (TIU = Tujuan Instruksional khusus and TIK = Tujuan Instruksional Khusus). "Instructed teachers" prefer to work with "instructed students", and usually instructed students are dependent passive and - of course - not autonomous, whereas good and successful learners are those reaching the autonomous stage of learners. Autonomous learners will be able to continue learning even without assistance.
One means to help learners become autonomous is by equipping them with learning strategies and training them to be able to use the appropriate strategies in solving language tasks. Learners should have a great repertoire of learning strategies. And the latest developments in cognitive psychology suggested, that we should not concentrate only on the cognitive competence, but also on the meta-cognitive and social / affective competencies.
This endeavor should be done before the students enter the universities, namely at the secondary level. However, it is possible that they already used certain learning strategies. Through the survey study in this research, the students' deficiencies in language learning strategies are identified, so that more attention could be paid to these strategies. The review of the related literature presents a discussion about good/successful language learners, their learning strategies and purposes and also reasons for integrating learning strategies in teaching English. The intention is to arouse awareness of the necessity of training learning strategies at high school level in preparing students to become autonomous learners. |