Learning Strategies Are Essential In a Curriculum

Learning strategies are Essential In a Curriculum

By learning strategies I mean any action which you may have to take to solve a problem in learning, to help you make the most of your learning process, to speed up and optimize your cognitive, affective or social behaviour. 

To give an example, I will put the reader of this paper in a testing situation. Please consider this sign¹, which is removed from the context where it usually appears, answer the questions beneath it, and then compare your answers with my comments.

 PLEASE BE QUIET IN THE CAR PARK

 DO NOT DISTURB PATIENTS

Who is this sign for?

Where would you find it?

Which is the key word that helped you to decide?

Clearly, this sign is addressed to drivers in a hospital car park, and the key word is patients. In this particular case most of the information in the sign is explicit, and you have probably not felt the need to stop and think - you have almost automatically processed it. There are no great problems involved, your brain has relied mostly on routine behaviour, and so no specific strategies were called for. But consider this other sign and answer the same questions:

PLEASE DO NOT TAKE

BATHROOM TOWELS

TO THE BEACH

Who is this sign for?

Where would you find it?

What helped you to decide?

In this case the knowledge of words such as take, bathroom, towels and beach was not enough – there is something more involved in the comprehension of this short message. You have to access your general knowledge of the world, so that you can associate these words with a very specific situation - you start making hypotheses, like, these towels are not mine, otherwise they wouldn't ask me to leave them in the bathroom ... in what sort of public place do I use towels that don't belong to me? So by a process of gradual approximation you come to think of hotels, and call in your knowledge of the socio-cultural conventions associated with hotels, beaches and hotel customers. Of course, because the sign is not placed in its proper context, the surface meaning of the words is not enough to make comprehension possible in an automatic way - you had recourse to a strategy. Notice that you used this strategy unconsciously, although, if asked how you went about it, you could describe your steps in the process, as I have just done.

To argue that strategies are important as bridges in the curriculum, I will use a metaphor: the curriculum as iceberg (Fig. 1).

Above the surface of this iceberg we have competence and performance - this refers to the question: What can you do, and to what extent can you show me that you can do it? But below the surface is your learning process. This refers to the question: How do you come to be able to do it? It is exactly here, halfway between competence (the "what") and process (the "how") that I put in learning strategies - to support and help you make the most of your learning process. If you think back to the sign about bathroom towels, you will realize that for a fraction of a second the sign did not make sense to you. However, because you are good strategy users, you immediately recognised that you needed something else: you prompted your brain to set in motion a process of association and a process of inference, you acted strategically.

Notice that when we consider strategies in the curriculum we are only still very much near the surface of the curriculum iceberg. Deeper below, we come to the question: Why can I do something just in that particular way I do it? We are obviously talking about learning style, aptitudes and intelligences, a person’s unique way of learning, her or his individual differences. This clearly makes a constraint on the range of strategies that come most familiar to people. For example, there are people who like and are good at using inference, but there are other people who find inference a difficult and even painful process.

As we move even deeper down the iceberg, we come to the very basic questions: What do a foreign language and a foreign culture look like to me? What does learning a language mean to me? And what role can I play in it, what role should my teacher play? Do I think I canlearn a language? Do I want to learn a language? Here we are concerned with very basic beliefs and values, attitudes and motivations².Again, notice how these issues feed back to the upper layers in the iceberg. Suppose that a student believes that reading is a passive process, in which all you have to do is let the text flow from the page into your mind. We could urge this student to use a variety of inference and association strategies, but she would probably put up some resistance to them and might even think that we were not doing our job as teachers because we are not giving her the necessary information.

So strategies are placed in a strategic position in the curriculum, but they cannot be divorced from the total context, which sets heavy constraints on their use.

To summarise my basic idea, we could say that

• on the one hand, strategies play a cognitive role in learning, because they facilitate and optimize processes, especially in new tasks, where one cannot rely on routine, automatic behaviour; in tasks which require and/or allow conscious thinking and accuracy (for example, in a writing task); and when one is faced with problems or is experiencing difficulties (for instance, when one does not know a particular word and is forced to resort to a synonym, a general word or a paraphrase);
• on the other hand, strategies play an affective-motivational role in learning, because they are tools in the learners’ hand, tools that they can use on their own and which can give them the feeling that they can do something to solve their problems and do better. This is what we mean when we say, in rather technical terms, that strategies promote the restructuring of causal attributions: if learners know that they can do something to achieve success in learning, they are less likely to attribute their success or failure to bad luck or poor ability. They can start thinking in a more positive way, they can start thinking that success can be in their hands if they make an effort and use the right strategies. In this way they are also increasing their sense of self-efficacy, self-confidence, and expectations of success – they are empowering themselves. It is as if they said to themselves: "Now I know the rules of the game. I can try harder, play better and maybe win".