%A MANDALA SAHJAYA 0513042038
%J Digital Library
%T THE CORRELATION BETWEEN STUDENTS? LEARNING STRATEGIES IN COMPOSING NARRATIVE TEXT AND STUDENTS NARRATIVE WRITING COMPETENCE
AT THE FIRST GRADE OF SMAN 5 BANDAR LAMPUNG

%X ABSTRACT
Writing is a process of expressing ideas, thoughts, and feelings in a written form using graphic symbols. And the mastery of the skills of writing is blended into the general objective of the School-Based Curriculum (KTSP) for the English subject. However, writing is such a difficult skill to master for students that they occasionally get frustrated in the activity, such as when they have to get the right dictions, search out ideas, and order words into larger syntactic structures or a discourse.

In fact, everyone has the same chance to learn a language, in terms of their capability. However, some students approach the language learning task in a more successful way than others do. The different rates of success among foreign/second language learners suggest a need to examine in details what learning strategies the successful learners consistently employ.

This research is designed to identify the types of learning strategies most students use and those the good and poor language learners apply most frequently in composing a narrative text. Another focus is to find the correlation between learning strategies and students? writing competence. Three learning-strategy systems are taken into account in this study: cognitive, metacognitive, and social strategies. Descriptive research and ex-post facto design are combined to profoundly dig out the most out of the data retrieved using questionnaire, interview, and writing test.

The findings reveal that the most common learning strategy among the students was cognitive strategy. Thirty-one (97%) out of 32 students used this type of strategy in writing a narrative text, whereas metacognitive and social strategies were respectively employed by 27 students (84%). Moreover, the students were classified into good and poor learners, in which nine of them belonged to each category. Cognitive strategy was used by all of the good learners (100%), while metacognitive strategy and social strategy by 78% and 89% of them, respectively. For the poor learners, only 89% of them used cognitive strategy, while a percentage of 78% users belonged to each of the other two strategies.

Data analysis was followed by a correlation test on the questionnaire scores and the writing scores to identify the correlation between students? learning strategies and their writing competence. The result indicates a coefficient correlation (r) of 0.335, which means that there is no significant correlation between students? learning strategies and their writing competence.

%D 2011
%L eprints13870