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Learning strategies, teaching strategies and new curricular demands: a critical view

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Learning strategies, teaching strategies and
new curricular demands: a critical view1

Introduction

In the past few years there has been a growing pressure on both teachers
and students to prove, show and “certify” what they are able to do. There
has been a growing concern for productivity, for the returns that school
work can bring in. The emphasis seems to shift more and more towards
competence - what you can do - and towards performance - showing that you
can do it. In a way, this has resulted in a shift of attention away from the
how - how you achieve that competence, the process you have to go
through, and also what schools and teachers can do to make learning
possible and rewarding for all students.

In this paper I will argue one basic idea and four main points. The basic
idea is that learning strategies are essential components of a curriculum, as
bridges between competence (what you have to learn to do) and process (what
you have to go through to reach that result).

The four main points are:

• first, that learning strategies belong to the learner and should be kept
distinct from teaching strategies;
• second, that there are no "good" strategies because people need to
discover their own;
• third, that we need tasks that prompt the use of strategies;
• and finally, that strategies should become part of selected classroom
discourse - in other words, a strategic approach should be woven into the
ways students and teachers listen and talk to each other every day, or,
to put it in more technical terms, into their interaction patterns.

1 Perspectives, a journal of TESOL-Italy, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, 2002, pp. 45-56.

http://www.learningpaths.org/papers/paperstrategies.htm
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 sign2, 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

2This sign, and the next in this paper, were taken from the University of Cambridge Local
Examinations Syndicate handbooks for the Key English and the Preliminary English
Tests.
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).

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 can learn a language?
Do I want to learn a language? Here we are concerned with very basic
beliefs and values, attitudes and motivations3. 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

3 On the impact of beliefs on learner and teacher strategies see Woods 1997.
 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".

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 teaching strategies, 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 explicit
instruction, 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
which strategies 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.

We need tasks that prompt the use of strategies

My third main point is that we should start from tasks, not from
strategies. This seems obvious, but the tendency in teaching practices and
teaching materials has been to focus not on actual learner strategies (that is,
what students really do when they try to solve problems), but rather on
what teachers, researchers and materials writers have identified as general
categories of "good" strategies. So we talk about classification strategies,
planning strategies, communication strategies, and so on. We can rely on
rather exhaustive lists and taxonomies of strategies, but we often forget
that these categories, lists and taxonomies are the result of generalizations:
they have been processed and neatly rearranged to serve as the basis for
research studies, for syllabuses and for developing materials, but they do
not reflect what learners actually do in the context of actual tasks while
trying to solve actual problems.

So if we take a set of strategies, for example, association strategies for

vocabulary development, or inference strategies for text comprehension,
and set out to teach them, we run the risk of believing that what we are
teaching is really what students would be doing in real contexts. But
things do not work exactly in that way. Research has repeatedly shown
that the choice of strategies depends on a number of factors, including the
language being learned, the level of proficiency, the learning goals, and the
learner's characteristics, such as age, sex, learning style, beliefs and
motivations (Oxford 1989).

I am not suggesting that we should not use ready-made strategy packages,

as are often provided by coursebooks. But I would like to stress the fact
that the starting point for strategy development should not be strategies,
but rather language learning tasks which prompt the use of strategies.
Obviously, not all tasks are suitable for this kind of work. Only those
tasks which include a genuine problem to solve really call for strategy use.
This has clear implications for materials design. Notice that problem-
solving can be a feature of the most demanding project work, but also of
a reading passage which creates expectations and calls for higher cognitive
skills such as inference and association. Of course this is not meant to
make things more difficult for students! We should continue to be aware
of the balance we should keep between task difficulty and students’ ability. It
is like walking on a tight rope: if the task is too easy, no strategy will be
called for and no new knowledge or competence will be produced – we
will fall on one side. If the task is too difficult, even the best strategy
cannot make up for abilities that one does not yet possess – we will fall on
the other side. So the question is how to find the right balance so that the
task poses a problem which can be solved by using strategies, a task which
involves a slight stretch for most of the students in a class.
Once we have decided to focus on one or more tasks of this kind, we
should then identify the possible strategies that could help a learner to do
the task: for example, given a reading passage, what strategies could be
used to tackle it? In this respect, I think that textbooks should help
teachers become more aware of the possible strategies involved in doing a
particular task. Our next step would be, not to directly teach students the
strategies we are aware of, but to help them become aware of their own
strategies and then come up with our own strategies for them to compare
and discuss, adapt and maybe change.

The word I would use to summarise my third main point is embedded - to

remind us that strategy instruction should start from tasks, from real
problems, so that students can perceive strategies not as isolated pieces of
instruction, or even worse, as a hindrance to learning ("just another brick
in the wall", to quote the Pink Floyd's famous song), but as the normal,
standard way of approaching tasks4.

Strategies should become part of selected classroom discourse

I have just shown that promoting strategy use is really a matter of

investigating what works best for individual learners in the context of
particular tasks. Teaching learning strategies is not teaching in the
traditional sense. We select a specific task that lends itself particularly well
to strategy work because it poses a problem. Then we set students to
work on the task, and, as they work through it, or just after they have
finished working on it, we sort of "weave in" a moment of reflection and
discussion on the strategies that they have used - or perhaps not used.
When I say "weave in", I really mean integrating this discussion within
classroom discourse, within what we and our students actually say when
we are together, working on the same task. When we interact, we are not
just speakers or listeners: in the same way, when we are working on
strategies, we are exchanging information, thoughts and feelings - students
presenting their strategies and us weaving in our own strategies, discussing

4 The question of integrating strategies instruction into curricular activities is always on the
forefront of teachers' concerns: "... to what extent is the "time out" from syllabus content
taken by the class justifiable in terms of improved language learning skills and improved
language competence? Should strategy training be embedded in a scheme of work or
should it be done as a "recognisably" separate activity? Should the training be done at the
beginning of a course of study (thus putting off actual language learning) or should it run
alongside the course of study?" (Macaro 1997)
and negotiating possible ways of approaching the problems posed by the
task..

If we look at things like this, we can start viewing the question of time in a
different way. One of the most frequent reservations and even criticisms
about strategies instruction is that it takes time, and time is at a premium
today. But if we view strategy work as part of our normal, routine
interaction with students, then it is mainly a question of checking the
results of a task not just in terms of right or wrong answers (the
"product"), but also in terms of the strategies used ("the process"). This
will not necessarily take much time - a few minutes here and there may be
enough, if this becomes part of our systematic way of dealing with tasks.
Of course, it is part of our job as teachers to select the most appropriate
tasks and the most appropriate moments to "weave in" this thread of
strategic work; it is a question of selecting and evaluating times and
circumstances.

My last main point can thus be summarized by using the word evaluative -
to remind us that we need to evaluate what strategies to focus on in which
contexts; but also, to remind us that students too need to evaluate their use
of strategies.

Conclusion

Learning strategies are essential components of a curriculum, as bridges

between competence and process. In the light of this belief, in this paper I
have argued that an approach to strategies education should be explicit,
experiential, embedded and evaluative - what I call the "4E approach". Such an
approach seems to be promising in that it offers
• task-based value - because strategies are first and foremost applied to
specific language tasks;
• skills-based value - because strategies can be developed across language
skills and communicative activities;
• cross-curricular value - because strategies can be made to overflow
through the watertight compartments of school subjects; and, last but
not least,
• lifelong learning value - because strategies can be part of our effort to
equip students with learning tools for the rest of their lives.
Bibliography

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Web sites

A selection of links from the Author's web page: www.learningpaths.org

Learner Autonomy in Language Learning. The Official Site of the AILA

Scientific Commission on Learner Autonomy.
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/div1/ailasc/
Learning Strategies Database. Center for Advancement of Learning,
Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio. A rich selection of general-
purpose and content-specific strategies with a bibliography of learning
strategies resources. http://muskingum.edu/~cal/database/genpurpose.html
University of Central Florida Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. Personal
Learning Styles: Inventories, Learning Styles Summary, Articles,
Applications of Research. http://reach.ucf.edu/~fctl/research/styles.html
Learning to Learn: Thinking and Learning Skills. University of Toronto,
Canada. Ideas, information and links on such basic issues as
consciousness, metacognition, learning styles, memory, language,
reading, problem solving, creativity and the biology of learning.
http://snow.utoronto.ca/Learn2/introll.html
Second Language Learning Strategies Project. Center for Advanced Research on
Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota, USA. What strategies
do students report using in learning a second language? How do
strategies affect the learning process? How can teachers help effective
strategy instruction? http://carla.acad.umn.edu/slstrategies.html

www.learningpaths.org – Luciano Mariani, Milan, Italy

luciano.mariani@iol.it

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