THE ENGLISH LEARNING STRATEGIES USED BY SUCCESSFUL STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT UNIVERSITY OF BENGKULU

This research aimed at finding the language learning strategy used by
successful students which is categorized into six kinds of categories; memory,
cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social strategy suggested by
Oxford (1990). The population of the research are students of English department at
University of Bengkulu year 2018 and 2019 that have GPA 3.75 to 4.00. The
methodology of this research is descriptive quantitative. The data were collected by
using questionnaires and the interview as the instruments. The population of this
research were 176 students and the sample were 25 students. The questionnaires
consist of 50 items based on Oxford Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL)
version 7.0. The data were processed by using Microsoft Excel 2010 to find the most
dominant strategy used by the students. the results from questionnaire showed that the
successful students use more than one language learning strategy or mixed strategy;
including memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social
strategy. The dominant strategy used by successful students was metacognitive with
mean score 3.94 followed by cognitive (3.70), compensation (3.55), memory (3.43),
Social (3.39), and affective strategy (3.31). Metacognitive strategy has positive and
significant influence toward academic achievement on successful students in learning
a language. Metacognitive strategies can help the students to develop good thinking
management ability. It also create good academic achievement. In the other hand, the
result from interview showed what the students reason in applying the strategies were
Improvement, Easy, Enjoyable, Effective, Comfortable, Varied, and Interested
Keywords: language learning strategy, succesful students.