Learning Strategies Belong To The Learner

Learning strategies belong to the learner 

That learning strategies belong to the learner, and should be kept distinct from teaching strategies, may seem obvious, even banal, but in fact most of the time teachers are the source of strategies, they hold them in store for students and seem to “dispense” them when they think it appropriate.

Textbooks are often full of strategies, but students rarely spot them as learning strategies, let alone think that learning strategies, as the term says, should belong to them. How often do teachers prompt students to use inference to deduce the meaning of unknown words? How often do they prompt learners not to stop when they meet a problem in reading or listening, but to go on and make hypotheses? And yet ... just leave students alone, on their own, and they will often fail to use those very strategies if teachers are not there to prompt them. Just give students a different task, and they will fail to transfer the strategies. Just let time pass ... and strategy training will melt as ice in the sun.

What's wrong with this? I would like to argue that one of the possible reasons for this is a sort of confusion as to the respective roles of teachers and learners. Learning strategies are often locked in the package of teachers’ resources and techniques, so that, in the student's eyes, they remain part of the teacher's strategies. In this way students remain unaware that strategic behaviour belongs to them. I invite the reader to reconsider how I dealt with the bathroom towels example earlier in this paper: I chose a task and a text which naturally invited  the reader to use strategies, and this is what actually happened. If I had stopped there, the reader might have seen all this as a technique which I had used to make my paper more active and concrete - in other words, the reader might have perceived what s/he had done as a result of my own strategies as a writer, not as the result of her/his strategies as a reader. But then I briefly discussed how and why the reader had used the strategies. In this way I tried to make the reader aware of what s/he had done, not so much of what I had done. The difference is subtle, but I believe extremely important. Unless teachers make learning strategies visible by disentangling them from their own teachingstrategies, students will not be able to perceive them as tools that belong to them:

"One of the most critical aspects of strategies instruction is tied to a shift from more traditional instruction that teachers found it difficult to make - a shift from implicit, teacher-directed use of strategies to explicit instruction with the goal of student-regulated strategies use." (National Foreign Language Resource Center 1996)

So I can summarise my first main point with a word: explicit. I am advocating a shift from implicit presentation of strategies to explicitinstruction, with the goal of promoting students' sense of belonging and self-regulation.

There are no "good" strategies

There are no intrinsically “good” strategies because people need to discover their own. Let me quote Rod Ellis (1994: 558) here, when he wrote that

"much of the research on language learning strategies has been based on the assumption that there are "good" learning strategies. But this is questionable.".

As a matter of fact, most of the strategy instruction that is carried out in classrooms and through materials belongs to one or more of the following types (Benson 1995):

• direct advice and suggestions, such as "Look at the headlines and the photos. What hypothesis can you make on the content of this text?";
• limited options, such as "Write an outline or draw a mind map before you start writing your composition";
• examples of what successful learners do or have done to achieve success, such as "Read what Tom, Anne and Charlie have done to solve their problems in speaking a foreign language. What kind of strategies have they used?"

I do not want to imply that this is all wrong and useless. Of course making hypotheses on a text is a sensible thing to do. Of course outlines and mind maps are useful. Of course people can learn from what other people have done to solve problems. However, one big risk that one can run in using these techniques is that one may see them as inherently good, as useful in absolute terms, thus forgetting the context of use of strategies, with reference both to the learner and to the task. On the one hand, we have already seen how the use of specific strategies is conditioned by individual differences - so the right question to ask is not, "Is this strategy good?", but rather, "Is it good for me?". On the other hand, the task itself has its own features and sets its own constraints: using an outline or a mind map can be useful, depending on a number of factors, for example, the kind of text I have to write, the time I have, whether I can or want to work on my own or with other people, whether I can write a draft and then revise it, and so on. So teachers can still use a variety of techniques to present and practise strategies, on two essential conditions:

• first, that students experience strategies in the context of actual tasks, and not in a vacuum, so that they can put the strategies to the test of a real challenge;
• and second, that teachers provide opportunities for students to reflect on, verbalise and socialise their experience, raising their awareness of whichstrategies were useful for which tasks:

"... Teachers need to make it clear that the goal of strategies instruction is not to supplant strategies that are already working, but to make students aware of the full range of strategies that students could be choosing from. Having more alternatives in one's strategic repertoire can increase one's ability to meet challenges in language comprehension and production. Moreover, teachers need to emphasize that the most important component of strategies use is being able to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies and choose alternatives when needed." (National Foreign Language Resource Center 1996)

I can summarise my second main point with the words experiential and reflective. Rather than just giving tips, suggestions or advice, we can let students experience strategies in the context of actual tasks and then we can let them talk or write about what they think has really worked for them.