Understanding Students’ Learning Strategies as an Input Context to Design English Classroom Activities

Learners’ individual differences in learning English as a foreign language with large-mixed ability classes needsa great attention in increasing their communicative language skills. One of Learners’ differences is learningstrategies. Learning strategy has a great role to promote students’ autonomy. It is one of front liners indeveloping communicative skills of English. Understanding students’ learning strategies becomes a strategic andimportant issue to gain brilliant ideas to design classroom activities and then, to promote students’ autonomy.The study conducted with students in two senior high schools, SMA Negeri 15 and SMA Negeri 16 MakassarSouth Sulawesi Province, Indonesia found that students only used meta-cognitive strategies at a high frequencyand memory, cognitive, compensation, affective, and social strategies at a medium frequency. In meta-cognitivestrategies, students have several degrees of autonomy promotion by independently organizing and evaluatingtheir learning progress, although other five learning strategies need intensively great efforts to support theirautonomy. Further implications of the study in English foreign language teaching and learning in the context ofimplementing school based curriculum in Indonesia are also discussed.