English Speaking Learning Strategies Employed by English Major Students
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Abstract
English speaking strategies are very important for learning speaking skills. This study aimed to investigate the English speaking language strategies used, problems on English speaking learning and ways to solve the problems on English speaking learning of English major students. The samples were 106 participants: 46 first year Business English major students and 60 first year English Art students from Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Buriram Rajabhat University. They study Listening and Speaking Course at the first semester of 2026 academic year. They were selected by using the Table of Krejcie and Morgan, stratified random sampling and simple random sampling, respectively. In addition, the qualitative samples were 10 interviewees: 5 first year Business English major students and 5 first year English Art students. They were purposively selected from their lowest scores of the questionnaire of each group. The findings were as follows:
- The English major students used the English speaking learning strategies in overall at the high level. When considering each strategy, it was found that social strategies, compensation strategies, affective strategies, metacognitive strategies, and memory strategies were at the high level while the cognitive strategies was at the moderate level.
- The English major students reflected on three various obstacles that hindered their speaking fluency: linguistic and vocabulary limitations, psychological and affective factors, and listening and pronunciation difficulties.
- The ways to solve those problems of English major students’ speaking learning were the use of affective and compensation strategies, self-practice and media-based learning, and social strategies.
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