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Second Language Learner Strategies Andrew D. Cohen

The Focus The first consideration will be definitional issues regarding second- or foreign-language (L2)1 learner strategies. Then the roles played by language learner strategies in research will be the focus of attention: the good language learner studies, strategies for learning a skill (listening, reading, speaking, writing, vocabulary, and grammar), strategies for learners in distance learning courses, test-taking strategies, and research on validating measures of learner strategies. Next, controversy and developments in the field will be discussed, and the chapter ends with the author’s stance on L2 learner strategies. Definitional Issues Regarding Language Learner Strategies Surveying the Experts Twenty-three international scholars met at Oxford University to advance the work on language learning and language use: (1) defining language learner strategies; (2) relating strategies to learners’ short- and long-term goals; (3) relating strategies to individual and situational difference; and (4) demonstrating and communicating the importance of strategies to the end-user (i.e., bridging the gap between strategy theory and classroom practice) (Macaro & Cohen, 2007, pp. 2–3). An outgrowth of the meeting was a survey of the views of respected strategy experts concerning terms and issues in the language learner strategy field. Altogether, 18 at the meeting and one other responded to the questionnaire. The results from this survey revealed a lack of consensus as to a unified theory, with agreement by learner strategy experts on some concepts and definitions and not on others (Cohen, 2007). The survey found, for example, that experts lacked consensus as to how conscious of and attentive to their language behaviors learners need to be in order for those behaviors to be considered strategies. While there was consensus that learners deploy strategies in sequences or clusters, there was some disagreement as to the extent to which a behavior needs to have a mental component, a goal, an action, a metacognitive component (involving planning, monitoring, and evaluation of the strategy), and a potential that its use will lead to learning in order for it to be considered a strategy. So, in essence, two contrasting views emerged—that strategies need to be specific, small, and most likely combined with other strategies for completing a given task, and that strategies need to be kept 681

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at a more global, flexible, and general level. There was consensus that strategies enhance performance in language learning and use, both in general and on specific tasks, and that strategies are used to help make language learning easier, faster, and more enjoyable. The experts were found to be somewhat unlikely to see strategies as compensating for a deficit. A Working Definition of Language Learner Strategies Language learner strategies can be defined as thoughts and actions, consciously selected by learners, to assist them in learning and using language in general, and in the completion of specific language tasks. Such strategies have been classified in different ways—for example, strategies for learning and use, strategies according to skill area, and strategies according to function (i.e., metacognitive, cognitive, affective, or social). The first distinction, then, is between language learning strategies (i.e., strategies for the learning of language material for the first time) and language use strategies (i.e., strategies for using the material that has already been learned to some degree) (see Cohen & Weaver, 2006). It could be argued that communication strategies are a type of language use strategy. When learners experience problems or breakdowns in communication, they may use communication strategies to avoid the problematic areas and express their meaning in some other way. For example, learners may paraphrase words or concepts (e.g., “I’d like something to dry my hands with” when they don’t know the word for “towel”), coin words (“air maker” when they don’t know “bicycle pump”), or use facial expressions or gestures in an effort to communicate and to create more time to think (e.g., hoping that a frown will signal that they do not approve of the other person’s behavior). At times, learners also compensate for gaps by using literal translation from their native language or switching to their native language altogether. Finally, communication strategies include conversational interaction strategies such as asking for help, seeking clarification or confirmation, and using fillers (such as uh and uhm) for pauses (see Erard, 2007, for more on this), along with other hesitation devices such as repeating key words. A second way to classify strategies is by skill area. In this approach, then, strategies are viewed in terms of their role in listening, reading, speaking, and writing. There are also strategies that apply to all four of these basic skill areas, namely, vocabulary, grammar, and translation strategies. A third way to classify strategies is in terms of their function, namely, metacognitive, cognitive, affective, or social (Chamot, 1987; Oxford, 1990). Metacognitive strategies are considered valuable in that they allow learners to control their language learning by planning what they will do, checking on progress, and then evaluating their performance on a given task. Cognitive strategies deal with the crucial nuts and bolts of language use since they involve the processes that learners go through in both learning the target language (e.g., identification, grouping, retention, and storage of language material) and in using it (e.g., retrieval of language material, rehearsal, and comprehension or production of words, phrases, and other elements of the target language). Social strategies encompass the means employed by learners for interacting with other learners and native speakers, such as through asking questions to clarify social roles and relationships, asking for an explanation or verification, and cooperating with others in order to complete tasks. Finally, affective strategies help students regulate their emotions, motivation, and attitudes. In addition, they are used to reduce anxiety and provide self-encouragement. One area of concern that emerged from the above-mentioned survey of experts was that strategies often occur in sequences or clusters (see Cohen, 2007). Consequently, it may be difficult for researchers to isolate the impact of a single strategy because its actual impact is cumulative, and is based on the effect of other strategies as well. So, while it may be more elegant to list out the strategy types (metacognitive, cognitive, social, and affective) for definitional purposes, the reality is that

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strategies are actually deployed in complex, interacting ways such that at a given moment it may be a challenge to determine the type of strategy that is being utilized. The Roles Played by L2 Learner Strategies in Research Various topics that language learner strategy research has encompassed will now be considered: the good language learner; strategies for the various skill areas; strategies for students in distance learning courses; test-taking strategies; and research on validating the measures of learner strategies. The Good Language Learner The field of language learner strategies got its start with an article by Rubin (1975) on what the good language learner can teach us. This article was an outgrowth of Rubin’s experiences sitting in on French, German, and Spanish classes, and her efforts to follow what learners were doing in those class sessions. She would watch them as they attended to class activities, listened attentively when students spoke up in class, and observed what they wrote in their notebooks—even taking notes on what they took notes on. During the breaks, she would go up to students that she had observed and would ask them to explain their class interventions and the notes that they had taken. She wanted to better understand their rationale for doing what she observed them to be doing. At that time (1970), there was no focus on what learners were doing in language classrooms. It was assumed that good teaching automatically meant good learning. A recent volume edited by Griffiths (2008) celebrated more than three decades of research since the appearance of that Rubin article. The book included chapters that dealt with strategies used by good language learners for the receptive and productive skills, and for grammar and vocabulary. While it is true that there is no one model of a good language learner, one of the findings to emerge from the good language learner literature was that, as just noted above, good learners use a variety of strategies to accomplish what they accomplish, especially metacognitive ones. Strategies for the Various Skill Areas: Listening, Reading, Speaking, Writing, Vocabulary, and Grammar The following section provides a sampling of the literature on language learner strategies in the skill areas (listening, reading, speaking, writing, vocabulary learning, and grammar), categorized in four ways: (1) a review of strategy studies in the skill area; (2) group studies of strategy performance in that skill; (3) case studies of strategy use for that skill; and (4) studies involving strategy instruction for that skill area. With regard to strategy instruction in general, interest in enhancing the learning and use of an L2 through strategy instruction has been on the rise at the elementary- and secondaryschool and university levels, at adult centers, as well as in self-access centers (Rubin, Chamot, Harris, & Anderson, 2007; Chamot, 2008). While strategy instruction may vary in form, it is likely to have the following features: 1. raising awareness of the strategies that learners are already using; 2. presenting and modeling strategies so that learners become increasingly aware of their own thinking and learning processes; 3. providing multiple practice opportunities to help learners move toward autonomous use of the strategies through gradual withdrawal of teacher scaffolding; and 4. getting learners to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies used and any efforts that they have made to transfer these strategies to new tasks.

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The effectiveness of strategy instruction with given learners depends on the specific learning context, the tasks at hand, and the characteristics of the learners (i.e., the learners’ background knowledge, their goals for learning the particular language, their style preferences, and their language strategy repertoire). While a given teacher’s knowledge about how to conduct strategy instruction plays a role, the impact of any given effort at strategy instruction is differential at best, due to the host of learner variables involved. There are also teachers’ guides that provide numerous examples of activities to be used by an instructor for the purposes of strategy instruction. The Cohen and Weaver volume (2006), which is intended for delivery of strategy instruction at all levels, and that by Chamot (2009), which is intended for levels K-12, are examples of these kinds of publications, which provide teachers guidelines for how to administer and supervise such activities. As it constitutes a major concern of research on language learner strategies, a sampling of studies by skill area will now be described, organized according to whether it is a review of the strategy literature for a particular skill, a group study of strategy use by skill, a case study of strategy use by skill, or a report on strategy instruction by skill. Listening Strategies REVIEW ARTICLE ON LISTENING STRATEGIES

A review of listening strategy research looked at studies on approaches to strategy elicitation, on the relationship between strategy use and listening success, on prior knowledge as a processing strategy, and on efforts to improve strategy use (Macaro, Graham, & Vanderplank, 2007). The conclusions were that the relationship between successful listening and strategy use needs to be explored more rigorously, that prior knowledge can easily be misused, and that, although there is a considerable body of literature exploring listening strategy use, the literature related to strategy instruction is more sparse. GROUP STUDY OF LISTENING STRATEGIES

A qualitative, classroom-based investigation serves as an illustrative study of listening strategies (Farrell & Mallard, 2006). The study described the types and frequency of receptive strategies used by 14 learners at three different proficiency levels in French while engaged in a two-way informationgap task. The findings were that the learners at all proficiency levels were able to use three types of strategies: (1) obtaining new information from interlocutors (forward inference, uptaking—indicating they were listening and presumably understanding, and faking—indicating comprehension when they had not understood); (2) confirming old information (hypothesis testing and text-level reprise—repeating the speaker’s words with a rising or falling intonation); and (3) clarifying old information (sentence-level reprise—repeating a word or words without understanding them at the sentence level, and global reprise—signaling a comprehension problem but without indicating what). Despite the findings that learners across proficiency levels used these strategies when needed, the researchers still recommended strategy instruction, especially for beginning L2 learners. CASE STUDY ON LISTENING STRATEGIES

An illustrative case study of listening strategies is that of an advanced English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) listener in Taiwan (Chen, 2007). The subject was a 30-year-old Taiwanese woman who had majored in English. Verbal report revealed that she used 18 strategies in order to comprehend four audio texts: (1) prediction; (2) using background knowledge; (3) listening for key words; (4) grammar analysis;

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(5) note taking; (6) inferring the context of the text; (7) message integration; (8) translation; (9) visualization; (10) reinterpretation; (11) selecting strategies; (12) increasing concentration; (13) prediction confirmation; (14) problem identification; (15) selective attention; (16) evaluation; (17) recalling the main idea; and (18) deleting impossible answers. Through the use of verbal report, the researcher was able to demonstrate how listening comprehension strategies varied by task. The reported strategies were categorized into three main groups: strategies for monitoring comprehension; strategies for assisting comprehension; and strategies for enhancing comprehension. These strategies were used in three listening phases: prelistening; while-listening; and post-listening. STRATEGY INSTRUCTION IN LISTENING

A recent study looked at the impact of strategy instruction in listening (and reading) relative to other powerful factors such as socio-economic background (Harris & Grenfell, 2008). The researchers conducted a quasi-experimental study, involving 120 from intact experimental and control classes of 12-to-13-year-olds learning French. Whereas the experimental class was exposed to explicit strategy instruction in listening and reading during their French lessons, the control class was not. Over a nine-month period, the experimental classes were taught 25 lessons or parts of lessons incorporating strategy instruction. The results were that listening strategy instruction benefited all students regardless of their prior attainment or prior attitude, their gender, or bilingual status. Another study involving strategy instruction investigated the effects of a metacognitive, processbased approach to teaching L2 listening over a semester (Vandergrift & Tafaghodatari, 2010). The 106 participants came from six intact sections of a French L2 course at the University of Ottawa, Canada. The 60 students in the experimental group listened to texts using a methodology that led them through the metacognitive processes (prediction/planning, monitoring, evaluating and problem-solving) that underlie successful L2 listening. The 46 control-group students, taught by the same teacher, listened to the same texts the same number of times, but without any guided attention to process. As hypothesized, the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the final comprehension measure, after statistical adjustment for initial differences. Transcript data from stimulated-recall sessions provided further evidence of a growing learner awareness of the metacognitive processes underlying successful L2 listening, as student responses on the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire changed over the duration of the study. Reading Strategies REVIEW ARTICLE ON READING STRATEGIES

A review of reading strategy research presents an overview of empirical research published since the 1970s on strategies for L2 reading comprehension, beginning with a conceptualization of the processes involved in reading, and noting that research findings are still not conclusive as to whether these processes are, on the whole, universal or language specific (Erler & Finkbeiner, 2007). They look at various aspects of how first language (L1) reading impacts L2 reading, and consider the nonlinguistic factors as well, such as cultural knowledge, motivation, and interest. GROUP STUDIES OF READING STRATEGIES

An illustrative example of a group study of reading strategies is that by Ho and Teng (2007). The participants of the study were 152 11th-grade EFL students at a vocational high school in northern Taiwan. The study administered two instruments to these low-intermediate-level English students:

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(1) a 32-item questionnaire asking participants to report the frequency with which they use certain EFL reading strategies; and (2) an interview guide used to probe participants’ reading strategies. The results showed that compensatory strategies were reportedly used the most frequently, with translation being the most frequently-reported strategy in this category. Metacognitive strategies were reportedly the strategies least used by these vocational high-school students. In addition, female students had higher mean scores on most of the reading strategy items, and proficient students used more strategies than less proficient ones. The explanation offered was that the proficient students chose to use various EFL reading strategies in order to comprehend the text, while less proficient students tended to skip the unknown parts. CASE STUDY OF READING STRATEGIES

A case study illustrative of work on reading strategies examined the sociocultural variables that influenced the strategy choices of two international students studying in the US, one at law school and the other doing a masters in business administration (Uhrig, 2006). The study documented how the two students used language strategies differently to succeed in their respective programs. The researcher used verbal report protocols, strategy logs, and interviews to arrive at a picture of how these students handled assigned readings and other course demands. Uhrig found that learning style preferences had a notable influence on language strategy choices. This finding confirmed and expanded the hypothesis that strategy use can be predicted by an analysis of task and learning style (Cohen, 2003). For example, the business student’s response to the teamwork requirement of the MBA program was to worry about communication in English. Because of his concrete-sequential and introverted learning style, he adapted to this challenge by creating and relying on summaries, and by working individually and comparing results with team members after establishing his own understanding. The law student, on the other hand, responded to the workload in his program with a general strategy of extending the minimum effort sufficient for getting by. His abstract-intuitive and extroverted learning styles led him to rely on his background knowledge and on other students as resources to minimize his efforts. STRATEGY INSTRUCTION IN READING

Two studies are illustrative of strategy instruction in reading, one involving elementary-level students and the other involving college-bound students. The first study was of strategy instruction at the upper elementary level in Singapore, where learning to read in English is regarded as essential because it is the medium of instruction in the education system, although the majority still learn it as an L2 (Zhang, Gu, & Hu, 2008). The participants were 18 pupils in grades 4, 5, and 6 from three neighborhood primary schools. The results suggested that the use of reading strategies varied according to language proficiency and grade level. High-proficiency learners seemed to be more concerned about meaning and knew that they needed to predict, summarize, infer meaning, and monitor their comprehension processes. For the low-proficiency learners, the attempt to read in English possibly terminated at the perceptual processing stage, and in other cases wild speculation and guessing permeated the process. The second study examined the willingness of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students to be engaged in strategic reading instruction in Singapore (Zhang, 2008). The study involved classroom activities over two months, following a social constructivist approach where meaning was constructed through dialog between an ‘‘expert” (i.e., a more competent learner/peer) and a ‘‘novice,” during which the latter internalized the new concepts under the teacher’s guidance as facilitator, participant, and interactant throughout each lesson. This quasi-experimental study involved an

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experimental and a control group of 99 college-bound ESL students from the People’s Republic of China (average age of 18). The strategy instruction program started with awareness-raising activities, followed by explaining, modeling, monitoring, and evaluating strategy use. The results showed that the teacher’s strategy-based instructional intervention evolving around participatory activities affected changes in the ESL students’ use of reading strategies and improvement in comprehension. The experimental group benefited more than the control group from group sharing and discussion of many of the instances or contexts where particular strategies were used. The two most prominent strategies distinguishing the two groups were previewing or survey texts and identifying organizational patterns of text. Speaking Strategies REVIEW ARTICLE OF SPEAKING STRATEGIES

A review article by Nakatani and Goh (2007) examined trends in L2 communication strategy research from both an interactional approach (i.e., a focus on the way learners use strategies during interaction that could help to improve negotiation of meaning and the overall effectiveness of their message) and a psycholinguistic view (i.e., a focus on mental processes that underlie learners’ language behavior when dealing with lexical and discourse problems). They highlighted how different researchers have described communication strategies and how the use of such strategies is examined in relation to learner and task variables in different contexts. They also examined intervention studies involving strategy instruction and their pedagogical implications. GROUP STUDIES OF SPEAKING STRATEGIES

A recent study of speaking strategies at the group level involved 94 Taiwanese junior-college English majors (Wu & Gitsaki, 2007). The study found that in general the higher-level English speakers reported themselves as using more oral communication strategies than the lower-level speakers. The only two strategies with an opposite result were “message reduction and alteration strategies” and “nonverbal strategies while speaking.” The results showed that the high-proficiency subjects reported making significantly more use of fluency-maintaining, accuracy-oriented, and social affective strategies than the low-proficiency subjects. CASE STUDY OF SPEAKING STRATEGIES

An illustrative example of a case study of speaking strategies is Carson’s study of her strategies for learning Spanish in Argentina (Carson & Longhini, 2002). Carson kept a diary of her Spanish learning for eight weeks of her Fulbright in Rio Cuarto, where she lived with a monolingual Spanish speaker and spent considerable time with the family of her colleague. Her data included 32 diary entries, which took into account her learning style preferences and language strategy choices. Metacognitive strategies prevailed, and she was able to link her strategy choices to her style preferences. For example, she found she was visual, introverted, intuitive-random, closure-oriented, and global. Consistently, she reported writing down material to use in oral language work (e.g., verb forms). STRATEGY INSTRUCTION IN SPEAKING

One study involved 30 participants receiving one week of strategy instruction and 30 receiving two weeks, with 15 in a control group (Iwai, 2006). The principle finding was that teaching

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communication strategies has a potential for L2 learners’ declarative knowledge to become procedural knowledge, thus enhancing oral performance. A second study looked at strategies for oral communication, the degree to which these strategies could be explicitly taught, and the impact of strategy use on communicative ability (Nakatani, 2005). In a 12-week EFL course based on a communicative approach, 28 female learners received metacognitive strategy instruction, focusing on strategy use for oral communication, whereas the 343 females in the control group received only the normal communicative course, with no explicit focus on communication strategies. The findings revealed that participants in the strategy instruction group significantly improved their oral proficiency test scores, whereas improvements in the control group were not significant. The results of transcription and retrospective protocol data analyses confirmed that the participants’ success was partly due to an increased general awareness of oral communication strategies to the use of specific strategies, such as maintenance of fluency and negotiation of meaning to solve interactional difficulties. A third study focused on the effect of a cooperative strategy instruction program on the patterns of interaction that arose as small groups of students participated in an oral discussion task (Naughton, 2006). Intact classes of Spanish EFL students from the University of Granada were randomly assigned to three experimental groups (n = 24) and two control groups (n = 21), and triads from within each group were videotaped at the beginning and end of the experimental intervention. The pretest showed that prior to strategy instruction, interaction patterns frequently did not reflect those interactions deemed important for language acquisition as identified within both traditional L2 acquisition and sociocultural research. The posttest revealed, however, that the program of strategy instruction was largely successful in encouraging students to engage in these types of interactional sequences (i.e., use of follow-up questions, requesting and giving clarification, repair, and requesting and giving help). Writing Strategies REVIEW ARTICLE ON WRITING STRATEGIES

Manchón, Roca de Larios, and Murphy (2007) conducted a systematic review of the empirical research on composing strategies published in English since 1980. They analyze how the strategy construct has been conceptualized in the empirical research on composing and identify the frameworks informing these conceptualizations. They summarize the main research insights regarding descriptive studies of the strategies used by L2 writers, and the impact of strategy instruction on writing strategy use. They also discuss the use of the L1 in planning, writing, revising, and monitoring L2 writing; strategies internal to the writer and socio-cognitive variables that are external to the writer; and studies dealing with the transfer of strategies across languages. STRATEGY INSTRUCTION IN WRITING

A study of strategy instruction for business writing was conducted at a technical college in Taiwan (Huang, 2007). The instructor-researcher drew heavily on a metacognitive framework in her approach to teaching 34 3rd-year students the basics of business writing—including explicit instruction, scaffolded instruction, expert modeling, think-aloud training, and self-questioning. While the study intended to explore how a metacognitive approach could enhance students’ ability to deal with business English writing tasks, low proficiency level and lack of motivation shifted the focus to describing reasons why learners did not make use of metacognitive strategies in dealing with problems in their business correspondence. Qualitative data were collected through: (1) information about work experience from a pre-course questionnaire; (2) students’ reactions to the instruction

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from a mid-term course feedback; (3) students’ comments in class, including oral feedback, group discussions and presentations, and individual students’ verbal report protocols; (4) students’ written assignments, feedback, and responses on test; and (5) the instructor’s reflective notes. Vocabulary Strategies REVIEW ARTICLE ON VOCABULARY STRATEGIES

Nyikos and Fan (2007) consider the lexical dimension of language learning in a report on studies that describe strategies through which L2 learners discover the meaning of unknown words, and integrate and consolidate newly acquired vocabulary. This chapter examines vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) with particular focus on learner voice (i.e., how learners report their own perceptions regarding their actual use of VLS). They look both at decontextualized VLS (memorization strategies, repetition, association, and keyword mnemonics) and at contextualized vocabulary inferencing strategies, as well as at dictionary and electronic look-up strategies. They also consider factors that affect VLS use, including proficiency, individual variation, and learning environment. GROUP STUDY OF VOCABULARY STRATEGIES

A study looked at word-decision strategies while reading among 40 US college learners of Chinese at the beginning and advanced levels (Shen, 2008). The study compared the strategies used by these two groups and then identified the most effective out of 100 strategies. It was found that both the beginning and the advanced learners accessed their mental lexicon in the decision process. Other strategies both groups used included making guesses based on intuition, combining the semantic information of each constituent character, deriving word meaning based on the semantic information about the constituent characters, applying knowledge of parts of speech to the target item or adjacent characters, and using contextual information. The advanced learners were more likely to use contextual knowledge. Word-decision accuracy rating for beginners was 50%, and perhaps surprisingly, only somewhat higher (54%) for advanced learners. STRATEGY INSTRUCTION IN VOCABULARY

Out of 106 college English majors in Hong Kong who responded to a questionnaire about their dictionary use, 25 agreed to participate in a strategy-instruction workshop (Chan, 2005). The participants were given a list of 25 erroneous sentences and were asked to use the dictionary that they would regularly consult. Areas of incorrect usage included the transitivity of verbs, countability of nouns, choice of verb forms, and choice of prepositions. Verbal report was used for recording the process of locating a target word, searching for the appropriate usage, and determining which was correct. Although students regularly consulted one or more dictionaries in their ESL learning, their dictionary skills were found to be inadequate and the recommendation was that they get instruction in it. Grammar Strategies REVIEW ARTICLE ON GRAMMAR STRATEGIES

Although it was the intention of Oxford and Lee (2007) to review the literature on grammar strategy studies, they found that there was such a paucity of studies that instead they wrote a position paper instead on how grammar strategies had largely been ignored in the research literature. Their chapter

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starts by offering an overview of the instructional modes that teachers employ for dealing with grammar in L2 classrooms. The first two entail either implicit instructional treatment of grammar with a focus on meaning or with a focus on form. The third and fourth entail either an explicit instructional treatment of grammar with an inductive focus on forms or a deductive focus on forms. Next, the authors explore diverse types of grammar strategies in connection with different kinds of grammar learning. As a link to the real world, they quote from a teacher’s diary about grammar instruction and grammar strategies. GROUP STUDIES OF GRAMMAR STRATEGIES

One recent study conducted during a 20-week course entitled “English for Living and Working in New Zealand,” investigated the students’ attitudes about ways that grammar could be dealt with in the course (Bade, 2008). The 14 students taking the course were all immigrants to New Zealand with less than two years in the country. The students responded to a 20-item questionnaire in the first week of the course, with 15 of the items focused, and another five open-ended (e.g., what they were doing with their knowledge and why they were doing it). The questionnaire related grammar to course content, inquiring about the kinds of resources that students used to assist in language learning, and the students’ preferred teaching methodology, kinds of feedback, and types of error correction. Reported strategies included using time outside of class to practice each grammar point for 10 minutes, trying out grammar forms in their own sentences based on a model sentence, and basing their learning of a grammar point on explicit rules and a text that exemplified these rules so that they could learn the points accurately. In another study, 20 highly-motivated students of Spanish were asked to describe their strategies primarily for dealing with grammar (Morales & Smith, 2008b). These were students who had attained high levels of proficiency on the ACTFL proficiency scale as compared to average students of Spanish. Nine were studying Spanish in university classes and 11 were home-schooled. The authors give examples of how the students used strategies involving mental images in order to remember the correct use of grammatical forms (verb inflections, por-para, ser-estar, direct vs. indirect pronouns, gender of nouns, and article use). STRATEGY INSTRUCTION IN GRAMMAR

While much attention is focused on the teaching of grammar, not much attention has been paid to how learners are to go about learning and performing it. And the somewhat unfortunate reality is that grammar forms are not just magically acquired. Even though in this era of communicative language teaching, there is a tendency to play down the issue of grammar and even relegate grammar learning to homework assignments, the hard fact is that learners encounter grammar forms that are problematic and may well cause them repeated difficulties, regardless of how well they are presented in textbooks, drilled in class, or exercised in homework assignments. As Oxford and Lee note in their review of grammar strategy issues, “grammar learning might or might not occur for a particular student. At heart, learning depends on the student” (Oxford & Lee, 2007, p. 119). One strategy instruction study focusing on grammar entailed exposing American university students of Spanish to mental image associations in order to assist them in differentiating the uses of the verbs ser and estar (Morales & Smith, 2008a). The reason for the strategy instruction was that the uses of these verbs were seen to present special challenges to the learners, for whom the verb “to be” was generally used for both ser and estar. The study demonstrates that the 113 students with brief exposure to visual images associated with the uses of ser and estar showed a greater improvement in their ability to distinguish the correct use of each verb than did the 90 students in the control group

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who did not get exposure to visual images to help in learning the distinction. The article provides useful samples of the instructional materials used to teach the distinction. Another effort at grammar strategy instruction involved the construction of a website featuring over 70 strategies deployed successfully by learners of Spanish grammar, including strategies from nonnative teachers of Spanish—who need to learn Spanish grammar in order to teach it (Cohen & Pinilla-Herrera, 2009).2 The website has audio- and video-clip descriptions from learners and nonnative teachers of Spanish about strategies that they have used for successfully learning problematic grammar forms. The website also includes diagrams, mental maps, charts, visual schemes, and drawings used to convey strategy information. The website can be used for obtaining strategies to enhance the learning of specific grammar forms, or to get ideas for strategies that could be applied to the learning of various grammar forms. In the summer of 2008, 12 learners of Spanish participated in a usability testing of the website, and changes were made to the site based on the feedback. In the spring of 2009, two University of Minnesota undergraduates similar in age and status to the website potential users conducted evaluational research with 18 undergraduate students of Spanish to determine the strategies that they chose to incorporate into their grammar strategy repertoire and what they thought of the experience. The study consisted of a website orientation session and two follow-up interviews. Findings suggested that students appreciated the practical nature of the website and the usefulness of the strategies. They tended to find that the strategies that they incorporated into their repertoire helped to improve their oral and written work, and had a positive effect on their achievement in class (Cohen, Pinilla-Herrera, Thompson, & Witzig, in press). Strategies for Students in Distance Learning Courses One study focused on the use of course management software (CMS) to improve the English language proficiency of international students (Weasonforth, Meloni, & Biesenbach-Lucas, 2005). Emphasizing that their aim was to demonstrate that the technologies available to distance teachers can be effective in fostering language autonomy, they showed how CMS enabled their students to work without supervision, to become teachers and researchers, to exercise choice, and to benefit from feedback other than the “right answer.” They also touched on issues that may mitigate against success in the use of CMS, such as resistance on the part of students to becoming autonomous due to often interrelated factors such as age, lack of experience with computers and online environments, and a preference for more dependent learning styles. Another study looked at ways in which learners conceptualize the process of distance language learning in terms of the interface that develops between the learner and the learning context in the course of learning experiences (White, 2005). The author explored the different dimensions of the theory, together with the purposes that the interface serves for distance language learners. Commentaries given by learners provided a link between the theory and realities of distance language learning. Test-Taking Strategies An area with robust research on language learner strategies over the last 25 years or more is that of test-taking strategies. Technically, such test-taking strategies are not language learning or language use strategies, but rather consist of either test-management or test-wiseness strategies (see Cohen, 2006). Yet, responding to a language measure invariably involves drawing on strategies for the various language skill areas as well. One issue that arises in language assessment tasks is the extent to which learners as respondents make use of their L1 and/or other language while performing in the

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target language. The review notes the valuable role that verbal report methods have played in the process of understanding what tests actually measure. A challenge for test-taking strategy research is that of finding ways to make the research effort as unobtrusive as possible, while at the same time tapping the test-taking processes. Research on Validating Measures of Learner Strategies Measures for Assessing Language Strategy Use among Young Children One type of study is that which has investigated the effectiveness of means for collecting empirical data on lower-primary-school pupils’ use of language learner strategies (Gu, Hu, & Zhang, 2005). Verbal reports were elicited from the children as they performed listening, reading, and writing tasks. Since most had difficulty in verbalizing their mental processes while performing a language task, the researchers had to ask probing questions in order to reveal their mental processes and strategies. The researchers encountered problems in four areas: (1) communication between interviewer and respondent; (2) strategy elicitation process; (3) silence, voice level, body language, and covert strategies; and (4) recording and transcribing data. The researchers felt that using specific questions to elicit verbal reporting could put strategies in the child’s mouth, and thus result in misrepresentation and overestimation of children’s strategies. The primary 3 students produced longer verbal reports and identified more strategies than the primary 1 students. Also, the higher-achieving students produced more strategies and better quality ones than the lower-achieving students (see Gu, Hu, & Zhang, 2005). Measures for Assessing Language Strategy Use among Adults As an example of a study to validate measures with adults, Oxford’s 50-item Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) was administered to 137 first-year Taiwanese EFL college students (Hsiao, 2005). Respondents were asked to indicate not only their frequency of use of the strategies, but also their knowledge of them, how effective they perceived the strategy to be, how anxious they were about using it, and how difficult it was for them to use. Knowledge of the strategy was found to be the most important condition for using it, followed by the perceived difficulty associated with using it. Another study reported on the validation of an EFL listening questionnaire designed to assess learners’ listening practice strategies in outside-class learning situations, and the frequency of practicing strategy use (Lee, 2007). A total of 206 freshmen non-English majors at a university in southern Taiwan participated in this study. The main instrument in the study was a Listening Practice Strategy Questionnaire (LPSQ) developed by the researcher. The reliability of the LPSQ was found to be high (Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient = .88). A factor analysis yielded five distinctive factors: problem-solving (i.e., through use of metacognitive, cognitive; and compensatory strategies), deliberate practice (i.e., regularity, effort, seriousness, and rehearsal); aural immersion (i.e., creating environments for aural immersion, such as through song); English-comprehension strategies (i.e., through listening to the English directly rather than reading the Chinese subtitles); and problem-avoiding (skipping incomprehensible portions). The findings showed that the students used problem-solving most and English-comprehension strategies the least. A study by Nakatani (2006) dealt with how valid information about learners’ perception of strategy use during communicative tasks can be gathered systematically from EFL learners. The study had as its goal to develop a questionnaire, the Oral Communication Strategy Inventory (OCSI). The research first called for the development of an open-ended questionnaire to identify learners’ general perception regarding strategies for language interaction (n = 80 first-semester EFL students). Then

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a factor analysis was run with 400 respondents to obtain a stable self-report measure. The resulting OCSI included eight categories of strategies for coping with speaking problems and seven categories for coping with listening problems during communication. The applicability of the survey instrument was subsequently examined in a simulated communicative test for EFL students (n = 62) that involved a travel agency vignette to role-play. Directly after the task, the students filled out the OCSI, indicating the strategies that they had used on the task. It was found that high-oral-proficiency students tended to use social and affective strategies, fluency-oriented strategies, and negotiation of meaning more than the low-proficiency students. Another study drew on work done in educational psychology to propose a new approach to generating a psychometrically-based measure of L2 learners’ strategic learning of vocabulary, operationalized as their self-regulatory capacity, as an alternative to the scales traditionally used to quantify language learning strategy use (Tseng, Dörnyei, & Schmitt, 2006). The findings showed that the proposed instrument had satisfactory psychometric characteristics and that the hypothesized theoretical model had a good fit with the data, providing evidence for the validity of transferring the theoretical construct of self-regulation from educational psychology to the area of L2 acquisition. The final study to be described in this section focused on verbal report, providing a detailed analysis of issues in think-aloud studies and recent methodological refinements (White, Schramm, & Chamot, 2007). The authors argue for the value of a contextual approach to developing an understanding of learner strategy use, so as to better understand how it relates to students’ experiences and the actions that they take as learners. They then consider methodological applications in two relatively new research contexts—online language learning and the learning of heritage languages. The final section of the chapter points to the value of widening research methods to include action research approaches. A case is made for collaborative action research as having much to offer in extending and illuminating our understanding of learner strategies, in strengthening the often tenuous links between theory, research and practice, and in demonstrating the ongoing relevance of language learner strategy research. Controversy and Developments Regarding L2 Learner Strategies The field of language learner strategies has always had its detractors over the years. A prominent critic of late is Dörnyei (2005, 2006), who—although endorsing strategy instruction for the sake of language pedagogy—has expressed skepticism about the construct strategy at the theoretical level. He has questioned whether language learner strategies actually exist as a psychological construct given what he sees as persistent ambiguity, and hence recommends referring simply to learner selfregulation rather than to strategies. In his view the process of self-regulation generates strategies as a product. He asks if what distinguishes an ordinary learning activity (e.g., using a bilingual vocabulary list) from a strategic one (e.g., adding color coding to a vocabulary list) is really enough to consider the latter strategic. Dörnyei also directs his criticism at the well-known strategy taxonomies (e.g., O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990) in that there are categories in which individual items overlap (e.g., cognitive strategies and memory strategies). Finally, he considers the most used strategy inventory, the SILL (Oxford, 1990), seriously flawed in that it employs a frequency-of-use scale, which implies a linear relationship between item scores and total scale scores. He would argue that given the diversity of the items, the scales in the SILL are not cumulative and computing mean scores “is psychometrically not justifiable” (Dörnyei, 2005, p. 182). In response to the claim that the language learner strategy theory is weak, there have appeared a series of reviews highlighting theoretical underpinnings of the strategy field, with some of these review chapters described above (Cohen & Macaro, 2007). The opening chapter of the book provides the most direct reply to the criticism at both a theoretical and a practical level (Grenfell & Macaro,

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2007). Styles and strategies-based instruction: A teachers’ guide (Cohen & Weaver, 2006) and the Cognitive academic language learning approach (CALLA) handbook (Chamot, 2009) would attest to the fact that language learner strategies are alive and well both theoretically and practically, as does the work on embedding strategies into L2 pragmatics instruction through websites for Japanese and Spanish L2 pragmatics websites under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota. Perhaps one of the best exemplars of the language strategy field in action would be that of the above-mentioned Spanish grammar strategies website since it operationalizes the notion of strategy so explicitly in example after example. As to the issue of strategy inventory design, Lee and Oxford (2008) cite confirmatory factor analyses of the SILL but also note the addition of new items to enhance its value in recent work in Korea. There are also other inventories, such as the Language strategy use survey (Cohen, Oxford, & Chi, 2002), which have undergone confirmatory factor analysis with good results (Paige, Cohen, & Shively, 2004, pp. 264–265). Another development is the work being done to provide taxonomies for strategies in the non-traditional skill areas, such as in L2 pragmatics, where strategies are needed for dealing with intended meaning in the given speech community. In an effort to make strategy instruction for pragmatics more concrete, a taxonomy was generated of strategies for learning L2 pragmatics, strategies for performing pragmatics (i.e., use strategies), and metapragmatic strategies (i.e., strategies for evaluating how effectively the learning and use strategies are being applied; Cohen, 2005). The complex nature of speech acts (such as requests, complaints, apologies, and the like) and the challenge that learning how to perform them presents seemed ample justification for the creation of such a strategy taxonomy. In order to empirically validate this taxonomy, the taxonomy was embedded into a website for learning Spanish pragmatics and an online virtual environment for practicing the performance of this knowledge. The validation effort consisted of a comparison of two environments for Spanish pragmatics, the above-mentioned Spanish pragmatics website, Dancing with Words: Strategies for Learning Pragmatics in Spanish http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home and Croquelandia, virtually authentic space for pragmatic interactions (Cohen, 2008; Sykes & Cohen, 2008, 2009). In the synthetic immersive environment, learners were able to move their avatar (i.e., personalized graphic representation) throughout the environment and do voice and written chat with a native speaker via a controlled avatar. These results suggest that the reported learning and use strategies, albeit modest, could be attributed to the strategy overlay that each group of learners received through the website and the immersive environment respectively. Since explicit identification and exploration of each of the strategies was included as part of the instructional activities, it was thus concluded that strategy instruction played an important role in pragmatics instruction on the web. It was also found that language students appreciated strategy instruction that was salient and explicit. Another development is the context-based approach to learners’ strategy use: seeing it as dynamic and varying across contexts, and hence a temporarily and contextually-situated phenomenon, as illustrated by the following two studies. The first is an autobiographical case study of how the college professor subject reported embracing different sets of strategies for dealing with English in six distinct phases in her life (He, 2003). Another study of 14 Chinese learners of English found that while popular language learning discourses, assessment methods, and influential agents (including teachers, experts, friends, and family members) had an influence on the learners’ frequency and choices of strategy use in China, strategy patterns changed when the learners moved to England (Gao, 2005). Some learners stopped their uses of memorizing, note taking, and regular reviewing strategies to retain new words. Instead, they relied on using more social strategies to guess, acquire, and apply meanings of new words in actual conversations. The interpretation was that the Chinese

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influences on language strategy use were perhaps undermined when the students started studying in British institutions. The Author’s Stance on L2 Learner Strategies In an ideal language learner situation learners become savvy consumers of L2s at an early age, maximize their experiences in and out of class, and become life-long users of a host of languages, thus facilitating their interactions with others in a variety of speech communities throughout the world, and enhancing their employment prospects and performance globally (see Cohen & White, 2008, for more on this approach). Learners start their language learning trajectory by taking a learning style preference measure and a language strategy inventory to see how style preferences and language strategy choices relate to each other. If the fit is not good, then the learners vary their repertoire or style-stretch to match their preferred strategy choices. Learners also check the fit between survey responses and what transpires when they engage in actual tasks. Beyond creating more savvy language learners is the need to further the work in specific domains of strategy use, such as strategies for grammar and for pragmatics, and to further develop websites where this information can be posted to the international community. In addition, strategy instruction should be embedded into language instruction so that learners are provided an opportunity to enhance their language learning experiences. While language learners around the world are becoming increasingly multilingual, there are still numerous cases of monolinguals and even among the multilinguals skills are not developed at a level that would be considered “professional.” A real concern is that the attained proficiency may not be adequate to guard against attrition, so as the years progress, the learners forget whatever it was that they had learned. Finally, given the accumulation of studies looking just at frequency of strategy use, there is a commensurate need to look at knowledge about the strategies that language learners use, the perceived ease at using them, and the perceived effectiveness of the strategies over time. As can be seen from the research studies reviewed in this chapter, language learner strategies have played a highly varied role in research, with the bulk of the studies looking at the use of strategies in a given skill area, such as speaking or reading. While the language learner strategy field has most certainly come into its own in recent years, there is still much to do. It is an especially propitious moment to do the kinds of fine-tuning recommended in this chapter in order to enhance language strategy use. Notes 1. For the purposes of this chapter, L2 will serve as a generic label, including both the context where the language is spoken widely and the context where it is not. In principle, L2 development will be faster in the former context than in the latter, but it depends largely on how the learner makes use of the available resources. 2. As of July 2009, the website is accessible at http://www.carla.umn.edu/strategies/sp_grammar.

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