|
Teaching
Learner Strategies for Vocabulary Acquisition by Darron Board
- 2
With
learners like mine, this is essential in maintaining motivation,
since successful use of learning strategies leads to success
in language learning. If I as a teacher can make strategy
instruction effective, I will be able to directly influence
the motivation of my learners. Chamot et al (1996) argued
that access to appropriate strategies leads to students gaining
a higher expectation of learning success, argued to be central
to motivation. This is particularly so if strategy instruction,
"is combined with metacognitive awareness of the relationship
between strategy use and learning outcomes" (1996:178).
Cohen (1998) argues that SI is useful more generally for teaching
how when and why strategies can be used and in helping learners
explore ways in which they can learn the L2 more effectively.
Cohen also highlights that learner autonomy is increased as
SI encourages self-evaluation and self-directed learning.
It has also been suggested that SI can help learners overcome
certain psycholinguistic and affective constraints in the
classroom. Nyikos (1996:112) claims that SI can help overcome
the limitations in learners' competence caused by:
| ·
maturational constraints, which may cause learners to
resist learning certain features (Doughty 1991) |
| ·
limited capacity processing, where learners can only process
limited amounts of information simultaneously, which makes
it difficult for learners to pay attention to both form
and meaning at the same time |
| ·
the "readiness" of a learner's interlanguage
to acquire a new feature (Pienemann 1989) |
Nyikos
therefore concludes that SI can help learners in four main
ways (1996:112):
| 1.
to help learners become more aware of the strategies they
already use |
| 2.
to apply task-specific strategies which help overcome
nervousness, the inability to remember and the need to
immediately produce language during oral communication.
Being able to overcome these limitations will obviously
make learning more efficient |
| 3.
to monitor the effectiveness of the strategies already
used |
| 4.
to create new strategies or abandon ineffective strategies
by consciously and critically reflecting on their own
strategy use |
Critique
of Strategy Instruction
With so much written about SI, it is logical that a fair amount
of literature about it has been on whether or not it is really
effective. The first main area of critique has argued that
instruction that attempts to teach learners certain types
of strategies (e.g. compensation strategies for dealing with
gaps in vocabulary knowledge) may simply be a waste of time
(Kellerman 1991). This is because students already know how
to use these strategies in the L1. The problem is not that
students don't know how to transfer these L1 strategies to
L2, but rather that they do not have the linguistic competence
to use the strategy effectively or they are perhaps limited
at an affective level. Cohen summarises this argument,
"Kellerman would explain an apparent inability to
use an L2 strategy effectively as resulting from a lack of
L2 language proficiency or from the inhibitory atmosphere
in the classroom, rather than resulting from a lack of control
over the strategy" (1998:108).
In my current teaching context this would not be the case
since the learners do have the L2 proficiency and the classroom
atmosphere does not inhibit the use of strategies. A second,
highly influential critique of SI has been developed by Rees-Miller
(1993). Her argument is that insufficient research has been
carried out to be able to claim that SI is wholly effective,
and she cites a number of studies that show SI to be not particularly
useful.
To
page 3 of 5
Back to the
articles index
|
