This study was done to study the learning strategies used by both low and high performance speaking students in developing their speaking skills as well as the differences between their learning strategies. The reason for conducting this research was that the competency of many students in speaking English was still considered unsatisfactory in Banda Aceh. We postulated that one aspect involved in the process of developing speaking skills was the learning strategies used by the learners. In this study, the data was collected through field research by means of documents, questionnaires, and interviews. The result of this study indicated that high performance speaking students had better balance in using all kinds of learning strategies (memory, cognitive, compensatory, metacognitive, affective, and social) for enhancing their speaking skills; the same could not be found with low performance speaking students. Besides, the high performance students employed more learning strategies consciously and appropriately compared to the low performance students. Based on the research results, it is suggested that students should be trained to be more aware of their own speaking learning strategies. They should use appropriate language learning strategies more consciously, purposefully, and frequently to be more successful in developing their speaking skills.

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Abstract

Research into students’ expectations towards native English speakers or teachers has been commonly investigated for years, yet the significant exploration of native teachers’ perceptions towards their foreign students are rarely examined. This study tries to find out the Native English Speaker Teachers’ (NESTs) expectations in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) students. The data were compared with Gani et al.’s (2015) previous study of EFL learners’ expectations toward their native teachers. The participants in this study were two native English teachers who are currently working at Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The interview was selected as the instrument to collect the data. The interview guide was designed and formulated based on a list of questionnaires that originated from Wu and Ke (2009). The interview with each teacher was recorded and the results were transcribed. The findings show that NESTs generally have similar expectations with the EFL students regarding speaking rate, learning environment, accent preferences, and assignments. However, diverse expectations occurred on the subject of syllabus design, grading system, grammatical correction, and pronunciation articulation. The results are further discussed in the paper. Consequently, the findings of this study can be used as a reference for both native teachers and EFL students in fulfilling the goal of learning in the classroom.

This research aimed to find out the English language proficiency of the local tour guides at the Aceh Tsunami Museum, Aceh, Indonesia, and the difficulties that they faced in communicating with foreign tourists in English. A quantitative and qualitative descriptive research design was utilized to collect data in which an English proficiency test and an interview were used as instruments. The research subjects were 13 local guides working in the Aceh Tsunami Museum. Based on the results from this research, it was found that virtually all the participating tour guides were in the categories of very good, good and average.  However, they still experienced problems with several aspects of speaking EFL, such as expressing ideas verbally, poor collocations i.e. incorrect or inappropriate word choices, poor pronunciation, and lack of confidence when speaking English. It is expected that the results from this research will become a useful input for the management of English Education institutions for improving their instructional systems and for tour guides to continue learning and developing their communication skills, especially their oral English communication skills.