Learning Strategies of High Achievement Students in English of SMA Dharma Pancasila Medan

Learning English is one of the important things for students to acquire English
well. Many students are still confused to choose what are the strategies that
appropriate for them. Several strategies can be used for students to get higher
achievement. Meanwhile, students have individual characteristics related to their
learning processes, the used of the strategies will give big impact for their
achievement. Students whose have high achievement also have their own
strategies in their learning process. This is why this research interesting. The
objective of the study was known what are the learning strategies used by high
achievement students of SMA Dharma Pancasila Medan. By using questioner and
interviewed which is adopted from Strategy Inventory for Language Learning
(SILL) version 7.0 (ESL/EFL) by Oxford (1990) translated into Bahasa Indonesia
to avoid misinterpretation and misunderstanding. The study's result was based on
the answers using yes/no questions to determine whether students used direct or
indirect strategies, from the interview session followed by the three high achiever
students of SMA Dharma Pancasila Medan. The first students tend to used
memory, metacognitive and compensation strategies as the main strategies. The
second high achievers employed cognitive, metacognitive, and compensation
strategies as the main strategies in learning English. Meanwhile, the third used
memory, cognitive and social strategy as the main strategies. The data showed the
students combined all strategies in the learning process and used three strategies
as the main strategy.