Issues in language learning strategies research and teaching

Abstract EN

Learning strategies are the thoughts and actions that individuals use to accomplish a learning goal.

Extensive research has identified the learning strategies used by students of a variety of second and foreign languages and a somewhat smaller body of research has documented the effectiveness of helping less successful language students improve their performance through learning strategy instruction.

This article discusses current issues in language learning strategy research that affect teachers and learners of foreign languages.

These issues include: identification procedures of learning strategies, terminology and classification of strategies, the effects of learner characteristics on strategy use, the effects of culture and context on strategy use, explicit and integrated strategy instruction, language of instruction, transfer of strategies to new tasks, and models for language learning strategy instruction.

These eight issues are explored through a discussion of existing research that illumines the issues.

Suggestions are presented for future research on issues that have not yet been thoroughly explored.

1 Introduction Learning strategies are the conscious thoughts and actions that learners take in order to achieve a learning goal.

Strategic learners have met cognitive knowledge about their own thinking and learning approaches, a good understanding of what a task entails, and the ability to orchestrate the Strategies that best meet both the task demands and their own learning strengths.

An area of basic research in second language acquisition is the identification and description of learning strategies used by language learners and the correlation of these strategies with other learner variables such as proficiency level, age, gender, motivation, and the like (Chamot & El-Dinary, 1999; El-Dib, 2004; Green & Oxford, 1995; Oxford & Burry-Stock, 1995).

Current research is also investigating the effect of the task itself on the selection and use of learning strategies,including the influence of the target language (Chamot & Keatley, 2004; Oxford, Cho, Leung& Kim, 2004).Applied research on language learning strategies investigates the feasibility of helping students become more effective language learners by teaching them some of the learning strategies that descriptive studies have identified as characteristic of the “good language learner” (Rubin, 1975; 1981; Stern, 1975).This paper first examines a number of current issues in language learning strategy research that have emerged from earlier descriptive and intervention research and discusses how these issues affect teachers and learners of second and foreign languages.

Finally, suggestions are made for needed future research in discovering how language learning strategies can assist students in becoming more effective second language learners.

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