Exploring Students’ Metacognitive Strategies in Speaking Class: a Case Study of 2nd Semester Students of an Islamic University in Bandung in the Academic Year 2016/2017

Spoken English is used in almost every sector of life. It is essential to be learned by students. However, speaking is also considered as a difficult skill to be mastered. Applying metacognitive strategies is one of the solutions to solve this problem because the strategies help learners to arrange and plan their learning speaking in the efficient and effective way. The objectives of this research are 1) to describe the kinds of metacognitive strategies commonly applied by English Education Students in speaking class, 2) to analyze the different situation that influenced students to use certain strategies, and 3) to describe the impact of using certain strategies to improve students’ speaking class ability. The method used in this research was the qualitative in a case study design. The participants were students of an Islamic university in their second semester. The instruments used were classroom observations, questionnaires adapted from Rebecca Oxford theories about metacognitive strategies, and documents. The result of this research showed that metacognitive strategies commonly applied by the students in this class are: Overviewing and linking with already known material, Paying attention, Organizing, Delaying speech to focus on listening, Identifying the purpose of a language task, Seeking practice opportunities, Self-monitoring, and Self-evaluating. The students used the metacognitive strategies in some occasions such as in classroom situation, in having a presentation, in leisure time, and when interacting with others. Then, the result also showed that students who applied metacognitive strategies got the high scores (more than 80) in the speaking class. It was clear that metacognitive strategies help students learn better. Therefore, based on this research, metacognitive strategies can be said as the right strategies that need to be applied by learners to enhance their speaking proficiency