Assignment – FP014 LS

SUBJECT ASSIGNMENT:

LEARNING STRATEGIES

Students’ full names: Alexander Martin Becerra Contreras

Ana Paula Perez Crespillo

Armando Prado Ventocilla

Linda Carolina Perdomo Melendez

Group: 2017- 06

Date: February 24th, 2019

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 Assignment – FP014 LS

INDEX

I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………...…...….……3

II. ASSIGNMENT TASKS

QUESTION 1………………………………………………….……………….....4

QUESTION 2…………………...………………………………….……….…….5

QUESTION 3………………,,,……………….…………………….…………….6

III. TRAINING SESSION……….……………………………………………………..…..7

IV.
CONCLUSION……………....……………………………………………………....…9

V. REFERENCES…………….……………………………………………………….…10

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 Assignment – FP014 LS

I. INTRODUCTION
Learning strategies are activities that people use to get control of their own
learning process. In order to teach a second language, the teacher needs to facilitate
learning to students and has to be aware of each one of their needs. Learning
strategies have become the main factor that helps students learn a second language.
Research shows that teachers are continually looking for, designing or adapting
different methodologies to promote the use and development of learning strategies. By
doing this, students can learn in their own way, constantly thinking of their own
language learning process and increasing their autonomous learning. The learning
strategies will depend on the student’s background.Thus, teachers lead students in the
correct direction to regularly reflect on their use of cognitive, metacognitive, and
social/affective strategies, so that they effectively engage in the learning process.
Learning strategies are used by L2 learners as tactics to make the new demanding
linguistic system and skills simpler.
Therefore, in order to make learners aware of their own strategies and teach
them how to manage these tools, teachers must apply different methodologies in the
classroom in order to make students capable of choosing the best strategies in their
learning process.

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II. ASSIGNMENT TASK

1. QUESTION 1

● Should the strategy instruction be short-term or long term? How long

should it last? A class? A term? A year? At regular intervals? Etc.

Good teaching involves more than communicating the content of a subject; a

good teacher also needs to motivate students to continue learning. Also, a teacher
needs to teach them the skills and strategies needed for continued learning. Teachers
have to provide students with the means through which they can get to the answers by
themselves, and go beyond formal classroom instruction for students to keep learning
after class. If they are provided with learning strategies and activities that apply to their
individual learning preferences, they are more likely to become more receptive,
motivated and efficient language learners.

Also, long term strategy training allows students to get in touch with a wide
repertoire of strategies. Besides, it allows time for the learning process to take place.
Having said that, in our opinion, it is not possible to teach all the strategies over a year
apart from teaching the language itself. We think that strategy training should be long
term and constant throughout the learners learning experience because it is hard to
teach a beginner how to be fluent and stop being an analytical learner, as they are just
beginners linguistically.

Also, it is important to recognize what strategies students already have, which

ones they need to train further and which one are most effective for them. Strategies
change through time: the strategies you have to learn when you're five years old are
not the same as those ones when your an adult.

To sum up, we think strategies and needs vary over time so strategy training
should happen all the time, just like a diagnosis of the students strategies and
interlanguage in order to modify our teaching methodology to fit their needs.

2. QUESTION 2

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 Assignment – FP014 LS

● Should the treatment of strategies be implicit (or “blind”) or should it be

explicit (“informed” or “strategy-plus-control”)? Or should it be a
combination of both approaches?

According to Oxford (1990), learning strategies are specific behaviors and

thinking processes adopted by students in order for them to achieve their goal of
improving L2 learning. Furthermore, she states that a certain strategy is neither good
nor bad. Strategies are primarily neutral, which means it will depend on the particular
context in which such a strategy is used.
Oxford goes beyond when she refers that a strategy is useful when certain
factors are met:

1. ‘’The strategy relates well to the L2 task at hand

2. The strategy fits the particular student’s learning style preferences to one
degree or another
3. The student employs the strategy effectively and links it with other relevant
strategies.

Strategies that fulfill these conditions make learning easier, faster, more
enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective and more transferable to new situations’’
(Oxford 1990, p.8).
According to Allwright (1990) and Little (1991), learning strategies can help
students become more independent, autonomous and lifelong learners. Even so,
students are not always aware of the power of consciously using L2 learning strategies
to make learning quicker and more effective (Nyikos and Oxford 1993). It is the duty of
skilled teachers to enable students to effectively use a large variety of learning
strategies in order to reach their ultimate goal.
When students have to study on their own, which is to say without much
assistance, they make use of learning strategies that reflect their basic learning styles,
which might be not the best or at any rate, be limited. On the other hand, students can
benefit greatly from teachers’ guidance to use a wider range of learning strategies
which go beyond the learners’ basic learning style preferences. (Ehrman and Oxford
1989)
In light of the above mentioned, we believe that the treatment of strategies
should be explicit, which is to say, ‘’informed’’. To support this notion, it is important to
understand that ‘’Learning strategies are intentionally used and consciously controlled
by the learner’’ (Presley with McCormick 1995). Furthermore, we should also consider

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that ‘'In our field, virtually all definitions of strategy imply conscious movement toward a
language goal” (Bialystok 1990 – Oxford 1990,1996a). To illustrate our point, in
Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition, Chamot and O’Malley (1996)
describe the CALLA model, which is a form of strategy-based instruction for ESL
learners that includes explicit strategy instruction, content area instruction and
academic language development.

3. QUESTION 3

● Should the teacher try to cover a comprehensive list of different

strategies, or should the focus be on a limited number of strategies?

We believe that a teacher should expose his or her students to a reasonable

number of strategies in order for learners to understand them, try them out and choose
the ones that work for them in light of their specific needs.

Cohen (1998:69) claims that the teacher’s duty during this exposure stage
should be to present, model and explain how, when and why these strategies should
be used. In addition, it is important to consider Chamot et al’s elaborated framework for
strategy instruction (1996), which suggests that strategy instruction is a gradual
process. Thus, the teacher must, as previously mentioned, present, model and explain
the strategies so that students can increase their responsibility little by little until they
can use them independently.

Moreover, in order to foster a metacognitive analysis, teachers can optionally ask their
students to reflect on the strategies they apply and analyze how they help them carry
out tasks more easily.

If teachers do not offer a wide variety of strategies for learners, they may use the same
ones for every task while they may not fit every task. What is more, strategies that work
for one student dodo not work for others, which is why it is vital for instructors to train
as many strategies as they can.

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 Assignment – FP014 LS

III. STRATEGY TRAINING LESSON

1. CONTEXT

This training session is designed for an intermediate ESL class with students
aged between 15 and 16, who are trying to develop their skills to an upper-intermediate
level. It is aimed at teaching learners strategies to read a complex text as efficiently as
possible and to be able to internalize these strategies and apply them any time they are
faced with a reading task.

Strategy #1: Predicting what the text is going to be about by examining its title
and the pictures that accompany it.

Learners who have been using ESL coursebooks for some time know that
chapters are usually divided into the skills to be trained, which include the four central
ones namely reading, writing, listening and speaking as well as grammar and
vocabulary. Therefore, when they are confronted with a section that says “reading” at
the top, they automatically know they have to read. However, they tend to jump into
reading without paying attention to visual cues that can help them predict what the text
is going to be about and thus better understand the text.

What students could do instead is to examine the title and the pictures and
write down predictions and discuss them with a partner. Also, they could brainstorm
words they think they might find in the text.

Strategy #2: Skimming the text.

Students tend to read the text just once, then look at the questions and reread
the parts they think are important even though they may not get the overall meaning of
the text. Therefore, it is a good idea to write a general question on the board, like “What
is this text trying to tell you?” for students to read the text quickly and answer it. They
can also check the prediction they made in the exercise above.

Strategy #3: Writing questions to summarize what each paragraph deals with.

This strategy is particularly helpful with multiple-matching exercises, where you

need to decide in which paragraph certain information is. Asking questions while
reading can help students to understand and remember the material better - especially
if you are dealing with longer or more difficult texts.

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 Assignment – FP014 LS

Strategy #4: Reading the questions before reading the actual text.

Reading tasks usually involve questions the students need to answer so as to

check that they have comprehended the text correctly. Reading the questions before
reading the text makes students focus on the information they actually need, instead of
trying to understand every single word in a text. Some students get frustrated with texts
that have many words they do not know; but why do they need to know the meaning of
those words when they are not necessary to complete the task? This allows learners to
relax, get the overall meaning of the text and the details they actually need to complete
the task successfully. They can also scan the text to find specific information without
having to read the text all over again.

Strategy #5: Guessing the meaning of words through context.

Including a follow-up vocabulary exercise with difficult words from the text
where students can guess the meaning of words from different options helps learners
develop this strategy that is also useful for listening tasks and to manage their
frustration levels when they encounter new words.

Strategy #6: Writing a summary

A summary is a written condensation of the most important points in a text in

your own words. You can rearrange or reorganize the ideas to make them clearer. As a
general rule, you should not copy more than five words in a row from a text and you
can use your own words to make the information easier to remember. The shorter the
summary is, the better.

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 Assignment – FP014 LS

IV. CONCLUSIONS
It is clear that when teaching a language course, we, teachers, cannot go
exclusively by what is written in the textbook we are using. It is true that nowadays,
more and more books are incorporating learning strategies to their content. However,
coming up with our own devices to teach these strategies is necessary so as to add
variety to our lessons. As mentioned in the last section, designing follow-up tasks, for
example, is an effective way to consolidate and check students’ comprehension of the
activity.
However, deciding how often to teach these strategies and to which extent is
also important as not every student has the same needs, but all of them need to learn
to be independent learners. Therefore, we conclude that teachers need to offer training
in a wide range of strategies to suit all the learners’ needs and learning styles. On top
of that, strategies need to be directly introduced and trained both in and outside of
class time and strategy instruction has to be long term and constant for students to
have time and opportunities to try them out, check which ones work for them and
hence train and internalize them.
Above all, students need to use strategies in order to make the best out of the
different skills that learning a language comprises. For instance, a student can predict
what a text might be about just by reading the title or the captions, and by looking at the
pictures and the layout of the text. Also, students can benefit greatly from learning to
make notes while listening to long recordings in order to comprehend the information
better. However, students might not have many ideas on ho to go about these
strategies. Therefore, it is the teacher who is to enable them to use such strategies
effectively.
It was established that learning strategies are used best by students when they
see a clear purpose in using them. Consequently, teaching these strategies should be
an explicit process that clearly defines when, how and why to use a given strategy over
others. It was also agreed that strategies should be part of long-term instruction
depending of the level and age of learners. That means that as students make
progress in the CEFR continuum, they will learn new strategies which should help them
read, listen for, speak and write better and more effectively. However, at the same
time, they will recycle strategies that they are familiar with. It was stated that students
should be exposed to as many learning strategies as possible and this should be
beneficial to them because it is them who will ultimately determine which strategies
work best for them based on their learning styles preferences. Therefore, the more

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learning strategies teachers train their students how to use, the better suited students
will be when faced with a learning situation.

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V. REFERENCES

Chamot, A.; Barnhardt, S.; El-Dinary, P. & Robbins, J. (1996). Methods for Teaching
Learning Strategies in the Foreign Language Classroom. In Oxford R. (ed.)
Language Learning Strategies Around the World: Cross-cultural Perspectives.
Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press.

Cohen, A. (1998). Strategies in Learning and Using a Second Language. Harlow,

Essex: Longman.

Ehrmar, M., and Oxford, R., 1989, Effects of sex difference, career choice, and
psychological type on adults’ language learning strategies. Modern Language
Journal 73: 1-13

Little, D., 1991, Learner Autonomy 1: definitions, issues and problems. Dublin
Authentik

Nyikos, M, and Oxford, R., 1993, A factor-analytic study of language learning strategy
use: Interpretations from information processing theory and social psychology.
Modern Language Learning 77 (1): 11-23

O’Malley, J.M., and A.U. Chamot, (1996). In Celce-Murcia, M. (ed.) Teaching English
as a Foreign Language. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Oxford, R.I., 1990, Language Learning Strategies: what every teacher should know.
New York: Newbury House.

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