Listening and Speaking Strategies: Investigating the Preference of ESL Learners in a Malaysian Private School

Abstract

Listening and speaking are considered as major elements in language learning yet practising them is perhaps challenging for students these days. Students become demotivated when they feel it is difficult to comprehend or share information in the language they are learning. However, the use of suitable strategies could possibly get the students to master the language. Therefore, selecting the appropriate techniques may assist learners in improving their listening and speaking skills. Thus, this study mainly aims to investigate the listening and speaking strategies employed by intermediate as well as advanced ESL learners. An online survey was conducted among 60 ESL learners from a private school. The questionnaire was adopted and adapted from the Language Strategy Use Survey by Cohen, Oxford and Chi (2002). Findings of the study show that the highly used strategies by advanced and intermediate learners in the survey are compensation strategy. This strategy has helped them to develop their listening and speaking skills when learning the language. Students tend to use metacognitive, cognitive, memory, social, compensation, and affective strategies as an approach to strengthen their listening and speaking skills. The reason might be because the strategies that were proposed in the survey were easy to practise, and be implemented in the future. The end result of this study shows that utilizing suitable strategies helps students to develop their skills in language learning.