An Analysis on Strategies in Writing Narrative Text Employed by the First Year Students of English Education Program at IAIN Tulungagung

Keywords: learning strategies, writing, narrative text. A strategy is one of the key factors which influences learners’ success in learning foreign language, especially in English. In English, there are four skills to be learnt and mastered by the students. One of those skills is writing. Writing is considered as the most difficult skill to be mastered among others. Therefore, the students need to practice more and apply appropriate learning strategies. Learning strategies enable the students to use their intentional behavior and thought during learning writing to help them understand the materials and store them as new informations. In writing a narrative text, the students have not only to tell a good story but also provide meaning in the story. The students should have ability to develop the ideas, apply appropriate vocabularies, and use correct grammar. Those requirements need long process to be mastered. Regarding to the fact, a students who intends to learn writing especially narrative text should employ a certain strategy to make his/her learning better. Research problems of this research were: 1) What kinds of strategies are employed by the first year students of English Education Program at IAIN Tulungagung in writing narrative text? 2) To what extend are those strategies contributive to help the students produce a good narrative writing? The purposes of this research were to: 1) find out the strategies employed by the first year students of English Education Program at IAIN Tulungagung in writing narrative text, 2) know the contribution of those strategies to help the students produce a good narrative writing. This research employed descriptive study design with qualitative approach. The subjects of the research were the selected five students of the first year students of English Education Program at IAIN Tulungagung. The instruments used to collect the data were observation sheet, questionnaire in the form of self assessment sheet and interview guide. All the data gained from the instruments were collected and analyzed qualitatively in which the researcher explained the data descriptively. The findings of this research were as follows. First, the strategies employed by the first year students of English Education Program at IAIN Tulungagung were classified into six types of learning strategies as they were proposed by Oxford (1990) covering: memory, cognitive, compensation, meta-cognitive, affective, and social strategies. In memory strategies, the students did the following activities: 1) memorizing new vocabularies by hearth, 2) providing special target in memorizing new vocabularies per day, and 3) making flashcard of new vocabularies and its translations, then pasting them on the wall bedroom and memorizing them. Meanwhile, in cognitive strategies, the students did the following activities: 1) making notes of new vocabularies that were found, 2) writing new vocabularies and pronouncing them, 3) opening dictionary, 4) reading narrative stories from books, 5) reading narrative stories from internet, 6) reading English novels, 7) observing surroundings and trying to write, 8) reading grammar books, 9) memorizing grammar patterns, 10) doing grammar exercises, and 11) practicing writing. Then in compensation strategies, the students did the following activities: 1) selecting the interesting and familiar topic and 2) asking someone for help. In meta-cognitive strategies, the students did the following activities: 1) paying attention on specific aspects of writing, 2) identifying purpose of writing, and 3) self-evaluating on their writing. Meanwhile, in affective strategies, the students did the following activities: 1) having relaxation before writing and 2) writing a language learning diary. The last, in social strategy, the students did the following activities: 1) asking someone for correction and 2) asking questions to friends or lecturer. Second, the students who were good in writing employed various kinds of learning strategies. All of those learning strategies gave positive contribution for the students. Those strategies could help and support the students to improve their writing competences and produce good narrative writing. Based on the result above, the students are expected to find their own strategies in learning as many as possible to improve their writing competences. In addition, the teacher is suggested to apply more various teaching strategies and give enjoyable environment in teaching and learning process