Istima’ (Listening) Learning Strategy Used by Arabic Education Students

This study aims to reveal the learning strategies that are reported more often used by Arabic language education students in studying maharah istima' and to elaborate on the practices to provide a comprehensive overview of how to learn istima'. This study is a mixed method with a sequential explanatory design, where the researcher takes quantitative data first, then explores it in more depth through qualitative data. The quantitative data taken through a questionnaire, adapted from O'Malley and Chamot, and Vandergrift's taxonomy of learning strategies, reported that cognitive learning strategies are used by 50.3%, metacognitive learning strategies are used by 39.1%, while socio-affective learning strategies are used by 44.5%. The qualitative data collected by follow-up interviews reported that the cognitive strategies used by students included inferencing, elaboration, imagery, translation, summarization, note-taking, and substitution. Inferencing, elaboration, imagery, and translation strategies are reported to be the most used, compared to summarization, note-taking, and substitution. Metacognitive strategies are reported to be used entirely, namely planning, monitoring, evaluation, and problem identification. Meanwhile, the socio-affective strategy was reported to be the least used of the three learning strategies and only used lowering anxiety, taking emotional temperature, and questioning

themselves, monitor progress, and evaluate the learning process. (Hamzah B. Uno 2011) The success of learning Arabic is certainly related to learning independence, because learning a language is essentially 'practicing the language' in various situations and contexts, with Arabic-speaking communities, with limited to teachers and students, or in other situations and contexts. (Wekke 2014) Arabic learners who practice the language more often have better learning progress than those who practice less ( ‫بن‬ ‫سعدون‬ and ‫لكحل‬ 022 2 ) The effort to find opportunities to practice Arabic is a form of learning strategy, so it can be concluded that learning strategies closely related to learning independence.
Oxford in Imam Asrori (2014) emphasized that language learning strategies have a major contribution to the language learning process because they are tools for being active, self-directed, and essential in developing language competence. (Asrori 2014) The study of language learning strategies stated that successful language learning came from the ability to combine different strategies in dealing with learning tasks or situations. (Rahimi and Katal 2012) There is no specific learning strategy that is superior to other strategies because each learning strategy has advantages and disadvantages according to the character of the learner and the task. An understanding of language learning strategies by students and teachers will provide better insight into learning (Liu 2010). Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010) conducted an experimental study on learning strategy. In the Experiment class, the teacher gave instructions to students about using learning strategies, such as planning, monitoring, problem-solving, and evaluation. Whereas in the control class, the teacher did not give any instruction about the use of learning strategies. As hypothesized, the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the final comprehension measure, after we controlled for initial differences. The hypothesis that the less skilled listeners in the experimental group would make greater gains than their more skilled peers was also verified. (Larry Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari 2010) Fedderholt added that teachers can direct students to choose learning strategies, because students may not know which learning strategies match them and match with the task. (Fedderholdt 1998). The selection of learning strategies must consider many things, such as student culture, learning style, motivation and learning goals, level of ability, material or task being studied, etc. (Liu 2010) Some studies on learning strategies reveal different uses of learning strategies which are motivated by several reasons, including highly motivated students use more strategies than low motivated students; women use more strategies than men; older learners tend to use more complex learning strategies; and learners with different learning styles tend to use different learning strategies. (Iskandarwassid and Sunendar 2011) Some scholars, who studied language learning strategies, classified them differently. Rubin's classification (1987), Oxford's classification (1990), and O'Malley and Chamot's (1990) classification. Their differences are caused by several things, one of which is about how they define and describe the learning strategies. Oxford saw learning strategies as just 'physical activity'. Rubin saw learning strategies only as strategies that are 'directly related' to learning activities. Meanwhile, Chamot saw them as an action carried out 'consciously'.
This study aims to examine learning strategies in maharah istima for students of Arabic Language Education, Tarbiyah Faculty, Institut Agama Islam Negeri Kediri. The researcher used the O'Malley and Chamot classification of language learning strategies, which grouped them into three major groups, namely: 1) cognitive strategies, 2) metacognitive strategies, and 3) socio-affective strategies. (Barnwell, O'Malley, and Chamot 1991). The O'Malley and Chamot classification has been widely used in studying listening strategy and is considered simpler than the Oxford classification which feels more complicated because the boundaries between several strategies are too close (overlap) to be  (Zarkasyi, Hanina, and Fauziah 2022) In summary, maharah istima' is defined as an effort to listen to Arabic with full attention, understanding, appreciation, and interpretation to obtain information, capture the content, and understand the meaning of communication that is conveyed through speech or verbally. (Tarigan 2008). This definition focuses on two main points: intentionality and efforts to understand the meaning (Abdullah and Gholy 1991) so that someone can give a proper response. From this definition, it is known that maharah istima' is different from hearing that occurs accidentally, such as hearing a crowd, etc., or occurs intentionally but without any effort to understand the meaning. These two listening activities certainly are not the language skills that are meant to be learned here.
Learning istima' which aims to obtain and understand information requires the learners' ability to recognize sounds of Arabic characters and their makhraj (pronunciation) so that they will not experience bias when listening.
In addition, students must also be equipped with enough mufrodat (vocabulary) and understanding of the qawaid (grammar). However, often students are still lacking in some of these basic things so they find difficulties in the learning process. Conscious use of language learning strategies will be able to assist students in organizing their learning process so that they can overcome their weaknesses in learning istima' and can find ways that suit their characteristics.
From the explanation above, the researchers are interested in studying in more depth the language learning strategies used by students of Arabic  Chamot (1990) and Vandergrift (1996) The questionnaire was made in the google form and was given to 58 respondents. The questionnaire begins with questions about student demographics, including age, gender, and TOAFL scores to determine student ability levels. Questionnaire questions about istima' learning strategies' totaling 20 items, using a dichotomous scale with "yes" and "no" answer choices. The dichotomous scale does not provide neutral answer choices so it will be faster in identifying the use of certain learning strategies (Muhidin 2017). These questions in the questionnaire were adapted from the taxonomy of istima' learning strategies by Vandergrift (1997): cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective strategies.

Follow-up with interviews
To obtain more accurate data about learning strategies that tend to be widely used by students in the maharah istima' course and minimize bias that may occur in the questionnaire data, the researchers conducted a second data collection, that is interviews with several samples as a follow-up to the questionnaire data. The interviews aim to obtain information about the difficulties and causes that might influence the selection of certain learning strategies. Interviews were conducted with several students from the selected sample based on answering "Yes/Agree" in the questionnaire because the researchers assumed that information about istima' learning strategies could be explored in wider and more detail.
Qualitative data obtained through interviews will be analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques in three main stages: 1) data collection, 2) data reduction, and 3) conclusions. The qualitative data aims to obtain wider about how the respondents learn maharah istima' so that the results of qualitative data analysis can provide a comprehensive overview of how to learn istima' effectively because researchers assume that there are still many students who do not have any idea about what they should do during learning maharah istima'.

Metacognitive Learning Strategies
Metacognitive strategies are mental activities that direct learners in their language-learning process. For example, when learners are aware of the fact that reading some related background material will prepare them for more effective o I try to think of questions the teacher is going to ask.

1.b. Directed Attention
Deciding in advance to attend in general to the listening task and to ignore irrelevant distractors; maintaining attention while listening.
o I listen really hard in doing istima'.
o I pick out the words that are familiar so that... In combination with inferencina.

1.c. Selective Attention
Deciding to attend to specific aspects of language input or situational details that assist in understanding and/or task completion.
o I listen for key words. o I establish the speakers in the conversation, their relationship by tone of voice, how they will address each other. This will limit the topics of discussion. In combination with planning, voice inferencing and elaboration.

Socio-Affective Learning Strategies
Socio-affective strategies refer to activities that involve interactions with other individuals or affective control in language learning.  Chamot (1990) and Vandergrift (1996): Definitions and Representative Examples.

Questionnaire Data Processing
The followings are the results and percentages of the data obtained through the questionnaire that is given to 58 student respondents:

Cognitive learning strategies
Quisionaire  and socio-affective were used by 44.5%.

Istima' Learning Strategy Reported by Arabic Education Students
As a mixed methods research with sequential explanatory design, the researchers continued to collect qualitative data through interviews in order to draw a comprehensive overview on istima' learning strategy used by Arabic Language Education students.

Cognitive learning strategy
From the questionnaire data, it is known that the use of cognitive strategies is the highest among the three groups of learning strategies.
Several cognitive strategies reported by students are inferencing, elaboration, imagery, translation, summarization, note-taking, and substitution. The frequency of using some of these strategies is different.
Inferencing, elaboration, imagery, and translation strategies are reported to be more frequent-used compared to summarization, note-taking, and substitution. The translation strategy is the most frequent-used strategy among them, in combination with other strategies. All interview respondents admit that they still translate the conversation into Indonesian mentally first, either through global translation or word-by-word translation, then they make substitutions by replacing some words or phrases to make it sound better.
The inferencing strategy is concluding using the information in the text or conversational context. In practice, this strategy is carried out together with a translation strategy to guess the missing information or meaning of words. Students who focus on capturing the meaning of words are often distracted by some foreign words that appear in the middle of a conversation. These words made him feel uncomfortable in understanding.
This problem can be overcome by using the cognitive inferencing strategy and its sub-strategies. Students can guess the meaning of the missing word by thinking about the overall phrase or the main idea, or by using other words that they already know the meaning of. Listening does not focus on understanding each word but rather on understanding the meaning of all phrases and then giving proper responses.
"Some difficult words, I just guess them immediately. I can understand the whole conversation." One of the students reports about using the inferencing strategy.
Besides that, guessing the meaning listening task can also be done by using the elaboration strategy and its several sub-strategies. The elaboration strategy is to use information outside the text or conversation context.
Students admit that they are easier to guess conversations about the topics that they already know or about things that they have experienced, so they can more easily build their understanding and guess the conversation even though they do not understand some words "The conversation recording (in the istima' task) is about the interaction between student and lecturer, or about topics that I know. But when it talks about unfamiliar contexts for me, such as mentioning places that I don't know, heavy topics, or complicated conversation, hehe..." one of the students report about using elaboration strategies.
The Elaboration strategy is quite close to imagery by definition, but they are defined separately. Students conducted imagery strategy by mentally describing (visualizing) to represent an information. (Asrori 2014) In understanding a conversation-recorded listening task, students admit that they like to imagine (visualize) the person who is speaking after getting the setting of the conversation (circumstances, place, or context) so that they can also understand the meaning of the conversation from how the conversation goes Summarization and note-taking strategies are carried out by students while listening to relatively long conversations on certain topics so that students can easily remember them to answer written questions. While listening, students focus on the key points in the conversation setting and write down a few words quickly so they do not get distracted for too long.
The note-taking strategy on the one hand is useful for helping to remember long recorded conversations, but it also has the potential to distract students' focus if not properly controlled.

Metacognitive learning strategy
One integrate the new material that they get (in the process of istima') into their interpretation so that they can make inferences (make conclusions) to guess the meaning of unknown words or missing information. In the final stage, they will evaluate the results of their interpretations and revise their hypotheses if necessary. (Stanchina 1987) Another study conducted by Chamot and Kupper states that effective listeners use a variety of strategies well, including directed attention, self-evaluation, note-taking, and elaboration. (Chamot and Others 1987). From these two studies, it is known that effective istima' learners combine cognitive and metacognitive strategies well because students who are successful in learning a language tend to use more learning strategies and have a long list of strategies.
(Altuwairesh 2016) From the interview results, researchers found that students were less aware of metacognitive strategies in maharah istima' which included planning, monitoring, evaluation, and problem identification. This is because the students do not know well about what to do in learning maharah istima' and how to do it. One of the students admitted that he had not made any preparation or planning (pre-listening) to welcome the istima' material or task.
"Emh..., I'm just waiting for the conversation recording that I have to listen to, that's okay." This situation illustrates that the learning process has not yet reached deep processing and is still centered on the use of cognitive strategies such as translation, inference, elaboration, etc. This is confirmed by questionnaire data which stated that metacognitive strategies were the least used. However, the researchers suspected that students who answered using metacognitive strategies in the questionnaire did not really understand them well, or maybe they used them sporadically without awareness. In the interview session, the researchers saw that some students did not answer questions in a straightforward manner related to the use of metacognitive strategies and tended to wait for explanations to gain new insights about istima' ways of using metacognitive strategies.
Some students reported using metacognitive strategies to overcome difficulties when istima'. Lack of mufrodat is a common difficulty while istima', especially when listening to native speakers from audio recordings.
Several students admitted that they were trying to focus their attention (directed attention) so hard then they could guess the global meaning of the conversation (inference).
Another difficulty is the conversations of native speakers in an audio recording that are relatively fast and heard unclearly because of different accents or because the quality of the recording is unclear. However, several students admitted that they were getting accustomed to listening to that audio recording after some repetition and could catch the conversation when the recording played for the second and third time. "In the first listening, we usually lost a lot. Often we did not even get anything." These difficulties happened because they did not accustom to listening to Arabic conversations by native speakers. In the first listening, students were still not ready yet, so they were overwhelmed to listen to it. But in the second repetition, students admitted to being able to control themselves and have self-management, find key points to pay more attention to, monitor their initial understanding, and identify the problems they experienced during the first screening. "During the second or third screening, it usually starts to get answered. Starting to know what to do, which ones to pay attention to, etc." Actually, the first playback was deliberately used by students as a process of assessing the istima' material, because the lecturer would always repeat the audio for two to three times.
In addition, the lecturer often gave written questions related to the audio recording that will be played. Several students admitted that they took the time to read a few of these written questions quickly to get an idea of the setting of the conversation (circumstances, place, context) or the theme that the native speakers would talk about in the audio recording.
This effort is a form of metacognitive-advance organization strategy combined with cognitive elaboration or imagery.

Socio-affective learning strategy
Socio-affective learning strategies are strategies that involve interaction with other individuals and control the emotional temperature in the learning process. In learning maharah istima', students were exposed to audio recordings containing native speakers' conversations, so there is not much interaction with other individuals, except as an evaluation or clarification activity to the lecturer. In maharah istima' this strategy is used more by students as an effort to control their emotional temperature so that students can learn.
Vandergrift's study of listening learning strategies using the thinkaloud procedure resulted in less than 1% use of socio-affective learning strategies by students, so he ignored them in discussion sessions (Laurens Vandergrift 1997). In learning passive skills, socio-affective seems more important for teachers to implement. Teachers need to be aware of negative attitudes and behaviors in students that can make progress hard to achieve, such as expecting perfection, perceiving themselves as having low abilities, pressure from being lower than their peers, and anxiety about failure. Such thinking can be reduced through goal setting, good attention, background knowledge of listening content, and recommendations for appropriate strategies. (Bao and Guan 2019) Several student respondents admitted that they only used strategies of lower anxiety and taking emotional temperature so they could learn in a relaxed manner, not nervous or worried, and could enjoy learning Arabic although with several difficulties. The questioning for clarification strategy was also reported to be used at the post-listening stage, where lecturers and students provide feedback and responses to each other.

Conclusion
The quantitative data taken through a questionnaire, adapted from