Photo Cube

“What do these images have in common?” asked Rebecca Oxford in her presentation “Help Your Students Become Better Learners; Understanding, Assessing and Teaching Language Learning Strategies” given as a part of Yeditepe University Graduate Seminars on 7th March 2011 in Istanbul-Turkey. An astronaut walking on the moon, an airplane breaking the sound barrier, and a rider jumping over a barrier…We responded that in each picture there was a confrontation of a challenge. In other words people were taking steps towards a goal. Then she explained that “strategy” in ancient Greece meant steps to win a war. Then there were tactics which were smaller than a strategy but also aiming towards achievement of goals. Yes! That’s it! I often had that mental image that teaching-learning is like a war. Students encounter a cognitive or affective difficulty in learning and as teachers we try to provide them with strategies to cope with barriers in learning. Rebecca differentiated between instructional strategies and learning strategies and defined learning strategies as: “broad, goal-directed actions consciously employed by the learner for the purpose of reaching certain language learning goals or overcoming language learning barriers”. Teachers are in charge of instructional strategies and students are/should be in charge of learning.

“why should we pay attention to learning strategies?”

When she asked this question I thought about my own teaching; how much time do I allocate for this? Do I focus on strategy training consistently and timely? I wholeheartedly believe that they are of vital importance and it was really very good to be reminded of research findings in this presentation.

• Strategy Inventory for Language Learning Research (Oxford, 1990) acknowledges that strategies are linked to proficiency and there are correlations among strategies and language proficiency on varying degrees, .30 to .73. In other words SILL predicts proficiency.
• Students’ use of strategies is significantly related to motivation. Students who have different strategies for attaching a text (war) will find a way to finish a given task.
• Strategies increase students’ belief that they can achieve a goal or task-self-efficacy

Language Learning Dimensions and Strategies in Each Dimension

Oxford’s Strategic Self-Regulation Model suggests students to take greater charge of their own learning. Cognition helps learners process information and build schemata-background knowledge, affect helps learners to control emotions and motivations and socio-cultural interactive dimension help learners to learn through interactions and deal effectively with culture and identity.

One of the criticisms raised was that educational pschology places much more emphasis on cognitive domain. For effective learning to take place these 3 dimentions need to interplay with eachother. 

A new point of view

It is often argued that there are meta-cognitive strategies (paying attention, evaluating, monitoring…etc.). Rebecca Oxford argues that these also deal with affective and socio-cultural and could be applied in all 3 domains- not only cognitive!. Therefore she suggests the term “meta-strategy” instead which is a large enough term to embrace cognitive, affective and socio-cultural interactive learning dimensions.

How do you assess learning strategies?

Many strategies were mentioned including;

• Think-aloud (you verbalize what’s going on in your mind during the task)
• Think-after (reflecting upon strategies in use after the task)
• Personal or group interviews
• Diaries
• Learning logs
• Observations strategy questionnaires (SILL, LSS; MARSI, SORS, MALQ)

The most important awakening point for me was that I realized I hardly use these assessment techniques for strategy use. I usually remain at the first phase of learner training which is introducing. I probably thought; “well, there is no time- the course is packed!” or “well they haven’t been involved in reflective activities such as these and now it is very difficult to start now”. But after-effects of this presentation hit me. I really believe that teaching and evaluating strategies are very important for education and decided to make something about this in daily operations.

How do you teach learning strategies?

Many suggestions were raised such as direct strategy instruction embedded in language teaching and learner guidebooks but I would like to prioritize and pick on one: color-coding of strategies. To do this first teacher classifies the strategies and associates each with a color. For instance in a reading lesson “focusing on key words to find the main idea” is red, and “looking at examples to find the main idea” is blue. Then students are asked to put a color post-it when they made use of that strategy.  

 I really enjoyed the presentation and it made me think about my own strategies in learning and the really good teachers I had (thank you, thank you, thank you…) and really good learning situations they created for me. It was good to hear about different learning strategies that are used and I am looking forward to Rebecca Oxford’s new book.