ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT HIGH ACHIEVERS’ LEARNING STRATEGIES AND THEIR IMPACTS IN WRITING DESCRIPTIVE COMPOSITION

The use of strategies can be useful when students are conscious about their capability in writing. Learners use various strategies as their approaches to deal with difficulties in writing. Oxford (1990) believes that strategies are the conscious steps of behavior used by language learner to enhance the acquisition, storage, retention, recall and new information. Inopportunely, there are still many learners who do not realize the importance of using appropriate strategies in analyzing their writing strategies which later can make the learners be anxious in facing the problems or difficulties in writing enhanced composition. This research is descriptive case – qualitative research dealing with learning strategies of English Education Department students in writing descriptive composition. The research questions were 1). What learning strategies are used by English Education Department high achievers in writing descriptive compositions? and 2). What are the impacts of learning strategies for high achievers’ writing descriptive compositions? To answer the research questions, interviews, observations, and writing analyses were used as research instruments on five English department students as the subjects of this research. Based on the academic data from staff administrator and lecturers, those students are high achievers in their writing course in the department. The researcher attempted to describe the types of participants’ strategies in writing descriptive compositions to find out the high frequency strategies and their impacts in students’ writing descriptive composition. The results demonstrated that the learning strategies used were able to assist the students in composing essays; those strategies are cognitive and compensation strategies. Nonetheless, some students consciously relish to use social strategy. At some points, the data showed that the more strategies used by the students, the better the writing quality will be