English Language Teaching in its Social Context

174 JACK C. RICHARDSMore recent work on learner strategies has attempted to yield more usable results bymaking use of data obtained from a broader range of sources, such as classroom observation,“think-aloud” procedures (in which learners record their thoughts and observations as theyperform different tasks), interviews, self-reports employing note-taking and diaries,questionnaires, as well as controlled experimental studies designed to investigate specificcognitive processes (e.g., Heuring 1984).These kinds of approaches are yielding informationof greater practical value. For example, Cohen (cited in Oxford 1985a) lists six strategiesused by successful language learners:Attention-enhancing strategies, such as responding silently to tasks asked of otherstudents in classUse of a variety of background sources, including knowledge of the world, knowledgeof the given topic, awareness of stress and tone of voice of the speaker, perception ofthe speaker’s body language, and cues from earlier parts of the conversation in theeffort to decode communicative meaningOral production tricks, such as avoiding unfamiliar topics, paraphrasing, and askingfor helpVocabulary learning techniques, such as making associations, attending to the meaningof parts of the word, noting the structure of the word, placing the word in a topicalgroup with similar words, visualizing or contextualizing it, linking it to the situationin which it appears, creating a mental image of it, and associating some physicalsensation to itReading or text-processing strategies, such as clarifying the communicative purposeof the text, distinguishing important points from trivia, skipping around to get anoverall conceptual picture, using substantive and linguistic background knowledge,reading in broad phrases rather than word for word, relying on contextual clues,making ongoing summaries, and looking for emphasis and cohesion markers in thctextWriting tcchniques such as focusing on simply getting ideas down on paper insteadof trying for perfection right away; purposefully using parallel structures and othermeans of enhancing cohesion; and writing multiple drafts.Willing (1 987: 278-9) notes that strategies are csscntially “methods employcd by the pcrsonfor processing input language information in such a way as to gain control of it, thus enablingthe assimilation of that information by the self.” Strategies are hence viewed as ways ofmanaging the complex information that the learner is receiving about the target language.Wenden (1 983) interviewed adult language learners about how they organized theirlanguage learning experiences and found that they asked themselves eight kinds of questions.QuestionDecision1 How does this language work? Learners make judgmcnts about thelinguistic and sociolinguistic codes.2 What’s it like to learn a language?3 What should I learn and how?Learners make judgments about how tolearn a language and about what languagelearning is like.Learners decide upon linguistic objectives,resources, and use of resources.