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SUBJECT ASSIGNMENT:
LEARNING STRATEGIES
Student’s full name: Cesar Aspajo Cano Julian David Catolico Pulido Edisson Manuel García Torres Adrián Camilo López Minotta Maria Alejandra Tovar Perdomo Group: 2018- Date:06/30/
Assignment instructions:
Under point 3.3.7 Issues in Strategy Instruction (in your written material) the following questions are considered as crucial before implementing strategy training with students: Should the strategy instruction be short-term or long term? How long should it last? A class? A term? A year? At regular intervals? Etc. Should the treatment of strategies be implicit (or “blind”) or should it be explicit (“informed” or “strategy-plus-control”)? Or should it be a combination of both approaches? Should the teacher try to cover a comprehensive list of different strategies, or should the focus be on a limited number of strategies? Bearing this in mind, design one strategy training lesson (1 or 2 hours long) aimed at a group of students of your choice. Make sure to first contextualize the target group and the type of strategies you want to work with.
they feel more comfortable and what they think it is more interesting to them. Once they do that, they start reporting what they have said first, on their notebooks and then, they prepare a speech where they can share their report with the class. Post-activity: Students share their reports with the class. In this part, it is important to mention that they will receive feedback from the teacher with the mistakes in both grammar and pronunciation so they can self-reflect upon their own performance. Should the strategy instruction be short-term or long term? How long should it last? A class? A term? A year? At regular intervals? As said above, learning a foreign language is a complex process; thus it requires great assistance of strategies to effectively improve learning. Rigney (1978) states that language learning strategies are operations (or actions) used by the learner in order to aid the acquisition, storage, or retrieval of information. But many questions may arise about this topic, for instance, what kind of strategies are the best? when are they appropriate? or how can they be applied? At this respect, there is not an exact answer since it depends on various factors and not a specific strategy matches all learners. Besides, Ritchie and Bhatia (1999) say that numerous strategies are combined and used in order to cover all aspects of the new language. One of the main objectives of learning strategies instruction is to aid learners develop skills that they will eventually transfer to several other academic situations; thus it tends to foster the development of competences, a broad issue which implies time and effort. Motivation, autonomy or reflection are other issues that necessitate long periods to be obtained as well as a careful guided process. This is why long-term instruction is desirable in order to ensure appropriate well-controlled strategies to better learning. Although reflections, exemplifications, could take place in a very short time, the guidance and supporting process to a trustworthy use of a strategy takes more than that. Therefore, it is not an issue of a single lesson or even the first term of the year, but different times according to the circumstances along the process. As Luciano Mariani (2002) stated ‘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’ One of the activities worked on this lesson refers mainly to reading skills, when students face the text proposed by the teacher and then search for their own. For this, students might be using some learning strategies, for instance, activating (bringing previous knowledge or experiences for text meaning), inferring (figuring out what is not
explicit) or questioning (asking questions to oneself or others about the text). The focused group is supposed to have an acceptable domain of the strategies mentioned due to the proficiency level, as these are present in every reading activity they do, so the students must have been consolidating them through a long-term process. However, these strategies can be improved by first socialising and discussing them in class, reflecting on pros and cons and putting students’ own conclusions into practice. The other important skill for the task is speaking, since students have to make comments based on the text and prepare an oral presentation to the class. This is a difficult skill for students, since it needs more elements than other skills. Brown (2004, p. 172) says speaking has five components namely: grammar, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency and pronunciation. Some strategies the students may be using for this task may include choosing a desired partner, asking a better student or the teacher for pronunciation or vocabulary, preparing a writing draft supporting on a dictionary, using gestures or paraphrasing. The main grammar structure this task involves is that of ‘reported speech’, where students must be facing some already known aspects such as verb tenses and new ones as the exchange time phrases. This topic urges students to base on their memory and summarizing strategies, as they will have to retell the class what people say in the interview or report they analyse. A short quiz or pair work, for example: https://www.examenglish.com/grammar/B1_reported_speech.htm, can be applied to check what they know or learnt and at the end of the lesson, ask about the ways they used to get it done. Of course, as Luciano Mariani argues, this can be done at every appropriate moment; therefore, at the post-activity section, apart from language feedback, the teacher and class will have a reflection talk on the learning strategies they used to complete the task. This aspect is crucial since the teacher can have the opportunity to get to know their students deeply and give advice or support to enhance their students’ own actions. Accordingly, the training instruction will be based on students’ reflections of every task or activity; the teacher will give guidance, examples, and modelling where necessary as well as awareness emphasis on the strategies they use. Enough practice on those strategies will be given from the instruction lesson on. Cohen (1998: 69) ‘ By explicitly teaching students how to develop their own individualized strategy systems, strategy training is intended to help students explore ways that they can learn the target language more effectively, as well as to encourage students to self-evaluate and self-direct their learning.
separately which makes them at some point inseparable and dependent (at least on this lesson) from each other. Should the teacher try to cover a comprehensive list of different strategies, or should the focus be on a limited number of strategies? Teachers can come across to the quandary of deciding whether trying to cover a comprehensive or limited list of different strategies when implementing this task. Therefore, taking into account class characteristics such as group age, culture and the background previously presented in this paper, it could be suggested to focus on a limited list of strategies. For instance, since the group consists of a total of 20 students who are about 14 and 15 years old, it would be appropriate to focus on some metacognitive and social strategies according to Oxford’s taxonomy (FUNIBER 2018). As it is well known, teenagers’ grade of attention is limited, and they often tend to disregard after some minutes of instruction, so it would be appropriate to teach them strategies related to the centre their learning. Thus, strategy instruction based on focusing on listening will help them not only to complete the above task but also in their own life, it will improve their capacity of attention and concentration. On the other hand, letting students know that tasks are not only a matter of a lesson, and that learning can take place in a great variety of situations can help them to be aware of their learning process. For example, by trying to cover other metacognitive strategies such as arranging, planning and evaluating their own learning can help them to go beyond the class instruction. In this way, strategy instruction based on these items of Oxford’s taxonomy can make students learn to seek practice opportunities, besides monitor their process. Hence, by trying to apply the reported speech, in this case, out of the class, students will be able to not only improve their learning but also be aware of their process which can make them attempt to take advantage of every learning opportunity. Furthermore, due to nature of the English class and the lesson itself, it would appropriate to focus on social strategies. In this way, students can learn how to cooperate with different partners in order to accomplish a learning task or a common objective. This lesson gives the opportunity to teach strategy instruction based on cooperation, questions and empathy. By doing so, students will learn how effective is to ask for clarification or become aware of others thoughts and feelings. Hence, focusing on a limited list of different strategies, the teacher can take advantage of the opportunities the lesson itself presents, besides concentrating on the needs the students have at the moment.
Conclusion In this part of the subject, we have seen that each approach includes a large number of curriculum design proposals, so we have elaborated a lesson focused on the communicative approach using large numbers of instructional strategies, techniques, and a limited list of different strategies. The teacher responds to the needs of each of the learners; trying to make the activities varied so that they cover different learning styles and strategies. Normally, when the couples' activities end, the teacher organizes feedback, pointing out alternatives, helping couples in the reading to correct their own mistakes. Learning is done through the interaction and cooperation for which each of the components of the class group is responsible. In the next block, we talk about the learning strategies aim to make the ultimate goal for teaching the four language skills, (especially the reading) based on the interdependence of language and communication. For some, the communicative teaching of the language involves little more than teaching that integrates the functional and the grammatical. We have developed a class lesson to understand what is the best way to put strategies to learn a foreign language. So the most effective way to learn it was from the use of explicit and implicit instruction strategies, focusing on the activity. For the former, students think about the types of strategies on homework; for the latter, they do not focus on instructional strategies. This can be seen in the lesson during the while-activity stage and post-activity according to the material the students are going to work on. We have chosen a limited list of strategies such as meta-cognitive and social because of the demand for class group characteristics; that involve thinking, making decisions about the learning process and relate to the speaker or the reaction to the text. It is worth noting that the teacher can help students to be aware of the strategies they use when carrying out the activity in order to better learn the EFL. If the reflection is done in pairs or groups, a student can learn new strategies used by other classmates and put them into practice in order to improve their learning process.
