Unveiling an Indonesian EFL Student’s Self-Directed Listening Learning: A Narrative Inquiry

Extensive aural inputs that support English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students to learn independently are ubiquitously found in the recent learning milieu. The ease is mostly influenced by the massive emergence of technology that shaped beneficial platforms. These triggered students to conduct listening practices beyond classroom activities. The present study aims at investigating one university student’s experience during her independent listening activities and how she obtained inputs from these activities through narrative inquiry. Underpinning Knowles’ Self-Directed Learning framework [1], this study developed a preliminary conversation about this approach to scrutinize the participant’s decision to learn listening independently considering the needs, goals, materials, strategies, and progress evaluation. In an attempt to gain the data, e-interviews were conducted. Afterall, thematic analysis was used to segregate the obtained data and help organize them to summarize the conclusion. The findings revealed that this student has gone through a very long process of independent English language exposures by listening to English songs and watching English movies. By doing so, she could improve her vocabulary, understand the implicit and explicit information from the texts, which eventually enhanced her speaking competence.