English education department high achievers' learning strategies and their impacts in writing decriptive composition

The use of strategies can be useful when students are conscious about their capability in writing. The learner may use various strategies as they have different approaches to deal with difficulties in writing. Oxford (1990) believed that strategies are the conscious steps of behavior used by language learner to enhance the acquisition, storage, retention, recall and one of new information. Unfortunately, some students do not realize the importance of using appropriate types of strategies, and analyze their writing strategies so that some learners are anxious facing the problem 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 the high achievers in writing descriptive compositions? To answer the research questions, interview, observation, and writing analysis were used as research instruments to five English department high students. Based on academic data from staff administrator and lecturers, those students are high achievers in their writing course of their department who have good communication skills. The researcher attempted to describe the types of strategies used by participants in writing descriptive composition, to find out the high frequency strategies and their impacts for students in writing descriptive composition. The results demonstrated that strategies used were able to assist the students in composing essay; 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 will be