Strategy Training for Second Language Learners

Author: Andrew Cohen (Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota )

Source: ERIC Digests Published Date: August 2003

Summary:

Learning will be facilitated by making students aware of the range of strategies from which they can choose while learning languages. Moreover, the most efficient way is to provide goals of strategy training which aims to provide learners the tools to 1) Do self-diagnose, 2) Learn the target language most efficiently, 3) Develop a extensive problem-solving skills, 4) Experiment familiar and unfamiliar learning strategies, 5) Make decisions to reach a language task, 6) Self-monitor and evaluate performance, 7) Transfer successful strategies to new learning contexts.

Language used strategies help students utilize the language they have already learned. For example, students get information from stored memory, practice target language structure and followed by communicating in the target language knowledge.

Strategy Rubin (1987) defined “operations employed by the learner to aid the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information”. Oxford’s (1989) finding six groups: metacognitive, affective, social, memory, cognitive and compensatory strategies.

Language Learning Strategies include two kinds of strategies which are direct strategies and indirect strategies. Direct Strategies : Memory(link, connection), Cognitive(manipulating), and Compensatory strategies(make up).Indirect Strategies : Metacognitive(managing and supervising) , Affective(emotional reactions), and Social strategies(enhancing learning)

Frameworks for Strategy Training is to raise students’ awareness, gives students various kinds of chances to practice in order to apply what they have learned into new contexts. Pearson and Dole (1987) proposed one framework includes the following steps: 1) Initial modeling, 2) Guided practice, 3)Consolidation, 4)Independent practice, 5) Application The second framework (descriptive of the various strategies to use for a broad range of learning tasks): Oxford et al. (1990) outline a useful sequence for the introduction of strategies emphasizes 1) explicit strategy awareness, 2) discussion of the benefits of strategy us, 3) functional and contextualized practice with the strategies, 4) self-evaluation and monitoring of language performance, 5) suggestions for or demonstrations of the transferability of the strategies to new tasks.The third framework of Chamot and O’Malley (1994) provides a four stage problem-solving process to help students complete language learning tasks: 1) Planning, 2) Monitoring, 3) Problem Solving, 4) Evaluation

Options for Providing Strategy Training (Ways teachers can apply in class)

1)      General Study Skill, 2) Courses Awareness Training, 3) Strategy Workshop, 4)  Peer Tutoring , 5) Strategies in Language Textbooks , 6) Videotaped Min-Courses, 7)  Strategies-Based Instruction (SBI) SBI Classroom is a student-centered approach which includes both implicit and explicit integration of strategies in to the course content.1)Model examples, 2)Elicit more examples, 3) Group Discussions, 4)Encourage to try, 5)Apply to language tasks to provide for contextualized strategy practice.

Steps for Designing Strategy Training which are based largely on suggestion of strategy training by Oxford(1990), Cohen(1998)

1)Determine needs, 2)Select strategies, 3) Consider the benefits of integrated strategy training, 4)Consider motivation, 5)Prepare materials and activities, 6)Conduct explicit strategy training, 7)Evaluate and revise the training,

Conclusion and reflection

The most important considerations are the students’ needs, the available resources, such as time, money, materials, availability of teacher trainers, and feasibility of providing the instruction. Besides, to raise students’ awareness in order to teach them how to identify, practice, evaluate and transfer other contexts is pretty important. Moreover, how to enable students to continue learning is the key issue. I believe the cognitive strategies of repetition, translation, note taking, contextualization and transfer, are quite frequently used and applied in my learning and teaching due to the reason that students need to imitate a language model by using different kinds of drills which will help them to be familiar with the sentence structures as well as the usages of key words. Besides, we can also find out lots of picture books have the same sentence patterns on purpose to foster students’ motivation and involvement, such as “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? By Eric Carl”, “Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney”. Besides, when I teach my fifth grader students in the elementary school, I ask students to translate my English into Chinese to double check everyone understand me and even in the monthly exams, the students are asked to translate Chinese words into English ones as well as Chinese sentences. Whenever I mention an important point or main ideas of an article, I will invite my students to take notes in order to review later. In addition, I always teach a key word or key phrase in a meaningful language sequence and invite my students to create their own sentences in the context. I also agree with theory of Krashen’s comprehensible input; however, before teaching my students something new, I will pay attention to what students have learned before and try to bridge the gap and provide students chances of using previously acquired linguistic or conceptual knowledge to facilitate a new language learning task. Furthermore, I think cooperation in socioaffective strategies is very essential. Therefore, I always group my students into several groups (five or six students in a group). Students are asked to cooperate with one and another to obtain feedback as well as compete with other groups a language activity. My prize is always attractive due to the reason that the winners or the hardworking groups can have less homework. All in all, I believe the more strategies we apply, the better learners we will turn out to be. As a result, I myself should learn how to use those metacognitive strategies first.