LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGY INSTRUCTION MODEL
INTRODUCTION Research on the learning strategies that second language students generate and strategies that can be taught is of great significance in understanding the operation of cognitive processes during second language acquisition (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990). Instructional models and material are helpful in illustrating the ways in which research findings can be converted into practical classroom activities. LLSI MODEL BY O’MALLEY AND CHAMOT The ESL instructional model was developed is based on cognitive theory. The Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) is designed to develop the academic language skills of limited English proficient students in upper elementary and secondary schools. The theoretical model on which CALLA is based, suggests that language is a complex cognitive skill. It requires extensive practice and feedback in order to operate at an autonomous level. The CALLA lesson plan framework incorporates learning strategy instruction, content area topics, and language development activities. Learning strategy instruction is both direct and embedded. In CALLA, new learning strategies are introduced and familiar ones are practiced.
CALLA lessons include both teacher directed and learner centered activities. They specify three types of objectives, namely, content objectives, language objectives, and learning strategy objectives. Each CALLA lesson is divided into five phases: preparation, presentation, practice, and evaluation and expansion activities (refer to Figure 1.1). Theses phases are often recursive and the teacher may wish to go back to earlier phases in order to clarify or provide additional instruction.
Figure 1.1 LLSI Model by O’Malley and Chamot (1999)
Preparation
Expansion Activities
Presentation
Evaluation
Practice
Preparation In the preparation phase, the teacher finds out , through brainstorming, what students already know about the concepts in the subject area to be presented and practiced, what gaps need to be addressed and how students have been taught to approach a particular type of learning activity. The lesson’s objectives are explained to students and 2
new vocabulary is developed. The learning strategies most commonly taught in this phase are elaboration, advance organization and selective attention. Presentation In the presentation phase, new information is presented and explained to students in English that is supported by contextual clues such as demonstration and visuals. Teachers make sure that students comprehend the new information so that they will be able to practice it meaningfully in the next phase of the lesson. Some of the learning strategies taught and practiced in this phase are selective attention while listening or reading, self monitoring, inferencing, elaboration, note taking, imagery and questioning for clarifications.
Practice The practice phase of the lesson is learner centered. Students engage in hands on activities to practice the new information they were exposed to in the presentation phase. The teacher acts as a facilitator in helping students assimilate the new information and use it in different ways. Cooperative leaning in heterogeneous teams is particularly effective during the practice phase, as students can work together in small groups to clarify their understanding of the information previously presented. The learning strategies in this phase are self monitoring, organizational planning, resourcing, grouping, summarizing, deduction, imagery, auditory representation, elaboration, inferencing, cooperation and questioning for clarification.
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Evaluation In this phase, students check the level of their performance so that they can gain an understanding of what they have learned and any areas they need to review. Evaluation activities can be individual, cooperative or teacher directed. Learning strategies practiced in the evaluation phase are: self evaluation, elaboration, questioning for clarification, cooperation and self talk. Expansion activities In the expansion phase, students are given a variety of opportunities to think about the new concepts and skills they have learned, integrate them into their existing knowledge frameworks, make real world applications and continue to develop academic language. This phase also provide the opportunity to exercise higher order thinking skills such as inferring new application of a concept, analyzing the components of a learning activity, drawing parallels with other concepts, and evaluating the importance of a concept or a new skill.
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LLSI MODEL BY OXFORD Oxford’s eight-step model (refer to Table 1.1) for strategy training focuses on the teaching of learning strategies themselves. It is especially useful for long term strategy training. It can also be adapted for one-time training by selecting specific units. The first five are planning and preparation steps, while the last three involve conducting, evaluating and revising the training. Table 1.1: Strategy Model by Oxford (1990)
1.
Determine the learner’s needs and the time available
2.
Select strategies well
3.
Consider integration of strategy training
4.
Consider motivated issues
5.
Prepare materials and activities
6.
Conduct “completely informed training”
7.
Evaluate the strategy training
8.
Revise the strategy training
Step 1: Determine the Learners’ Needs and the Time Available The initial step in a training program is to consider the needs of the learners and determine the amount of time needed for the activity. Consider first who the learners are and what they need. Are they children, adolescents, college students, graduate students or adults in continuing education? What are their strength and weaknesses? What learning
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strategies have they been using? Is there a gap between the strategies they have been using and those learners think they have to learn? Consider also how much time learners and learners students have available for strategy training and when learners might do it. Are learners pressed for time or can learners work strategy training in with no trouble? Step 2: Select Strategies Well First, select strategies which are related to the needs and characteristics of learners. Note especially whether there are strong cultural biases in favor or against a particular strategy. If strong biases exist, choose strategies that do not completely contradict what the learners are already doing. Second, chose more than one kind of strategy to teach. Decide the kinds of compatible, mutually supporting strategies that are important for students. Third, choose strategies that are generally useful for most learners and transferable to a variety of language situations and tasks. Fourth, choose strategies that are easy to learn and valuable
to the learner. In
other words, do not include all easy strategies or all difficult strategies. Step 3: Consider Integration of Strategy Training It is most helpful to integrate strategy training with the tasks, objectives, and materials used in the regular language training program. Attempts to provide detached, content independent strategy training have been moderately successful. Learners sometimes rebel against strategy training that is not sufficiently linked to their own language training.
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When strategy training is integrated with language learning, learners understand better how the strategies can be used in significant, meaningful context. Meaningfulness makes it easier to remember the strategies. However, it is also necessary to show learners how to transfer the strategies to new tasks, outside of the immediate ones. Step 4: Consider Motivational Issues Consider the kind of motivation teachers will build into a training program. Decide whether to give grades or partial course credit for attainment of new strategy. If learners have gone through a strategy assessment phase, their interest in strategies is likely to be heightened. If a teacher explains how using a good strategy can make language learning easier, students will be more interested in participating strategy training. Another way to increase motivation is to let learners have some say in selecting the language activities or tasks they will use, or let them choose strategies they will learn. Language teachers need to be sensitive to learners’ original strategy preferences and the motivation that propels these preferences. This means that teachers should phase in very new strategies gently and gradually, without whisking away students’ ‘security blankets’.
Step 5: Prepare Materials and Activities The materials that can be used for strategy training are handouts or handbook. Learners can also develop a strategy handbook themselves. They can contribute to it incrementally, as they learn new strategies that prove successful to them.
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Step 6: Conduct “Completely Informed Training” Make a special point to inform the learners as completely as possible about why the strategies are important and how they can be used in new situations. Learners need to be given explicit opportunity to evaluate the success of their new strategies and exploring the reasons why theses strategies might have helped. Research shows that strategy training which fully informs the learners, by indicating why the strategy is useful and how it can be transferred to different tasks, is more successful than training that does not. Most learners perform best with completely informed training (Brown et al., 1980a). In the very rare instances, when informed training proves impossible, more subtle training techniques might be necessary. For example, when learners are through cultural influences, new strategies need to be camouflaged or introduced very gradually, paired with strategies the learners already know and prefer. Step 7: Evaluate the Strategy Training Learners’ own comments about their strategy use are part of the training itself. These self assessments provide practice with the strategies of self monitoring and self evaluating, during and after the training, own observations are useful for evaluating the success of strategy training. Possible criteria for evaluating training are task improvement, general skill improvement, maintenance of the new strategy, transfer of strategy to other relevant tasks and improvement in learner’s attitude. Step 8: Revise the Strategy Training The evaluation phase (Step 7) will suggest possible revisions. This leads right back to Step 1, a reconsideration of the characteristics and needs of the learners in light of the cycle of strategy training that has just occurred. 8
LLSI MODEL BY MACARO Macaro’s model is cynical and similar to the model of action research. It takes you from an identification of the problem, through to being able to evaluate the efficacy of the action. Macaro (2001) has proposed a system of leaner training based on a series of nine steps. This model is represented in Figure 1.2 below.
Figure 1.2 Learner strategies training cycle
9. Monitoring strategy use and rewarding effort 8. Evaluation by students (and teachers)
7. Gradual removal of scaffolding
1. Raise the awareness of the students
2. Exploration of possible strategies available
Learner Strategies Training Cycle
6. Initial evaluation by students
3. Modeling by teacher and/or other students
5. Application of strategies with scaffolded support
4. Combining strategies for a specific purpose or specific task
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Steps 1 and 2: Raising awareness and exploring the range of strategies All learners have been employing strategies for use with their L1 for many years. One possible way to start would be to ask them to think back to when they were in primary school and how they went about improving their reading and writing skills. Write some of these ideas on a large sheet of paper pinned on the wall. Ask them if any of these strategies are natural strategies (developed of their own accord) or taught strategies. Next, make comparison with L2 strategies. It is a good idea to divide them into small groups with a list of open ended questions to discuss and then get the groups to feed back to their whole class. For initial awareness-raising, a short questionnaire may perhaps be introduced. Metacognitive, social and affective strategies could be included in the questionnaire. This would mean that a whole range of questions could be asked to support and evaluate learners’ learning. It would have the added advantage if the questionnaire has a frequency of use (often, sometimes, not often etc). Questionnaires can then be collected and analyzed. At this point, it will be important to discuss why the use of these strategies might help the students to learn more effectively. Discuss with students the problems of learning a language in the classroom and the strategies that they can use in order to overcome these problems. Another way to raise awareness is to provide the students with examples of strategies used by other individual students. These are highly personalized sequence of strategies and may provoke an interesting reaction from learners. To raise awareness over time, students could keep a diary to show the way they learn. By doing this, teachers will be provided with a broader picture of their students’ progress. This is a perfectly appropriate approach to take once a learner has decided to embark on a programme of strategy training.
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Steps 3, 4 and 5: Modeling, combining and applying strategies Making the learners aware of the existence of strategies and exploring the range of available strategies is not going to bring about successful strategy use. Learners may need to be shown explicitly and repeatedly the strategies which they can try in order to achieve better learning. Reading comprehension strategies An effective way of modeling strategy use in reading is to do it in front of learners . try to show how the text is more accessed successfully if strategies are used in combination. Ask learners to identify a problem in the text and get them to try to apply a combination of strategies (e.g. Guess what the word means from the context and use their ‘world knowledge’ and common sense). Listening comprehension strategies Identify with the class the differences between reading and listening. Provide learners with short reading texts and ask them to predict which words or ideas would be likely to come up in a listening text on that topic. Then give them a transcription of a taped text but with some changes made to the text and discuss how they managed to scan for the differences. Interactive strategies As learners become more proficient in the language, they will be bale to rely more on strategies which use knowledge of the language itself such as circumlocution, syntax avoidance and discourse avoidance. To develop effective use of intonation and mime, provide students with dialogues, role plays and conversations in front of the class.
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Coinage or prediction strategies Students may be asked to try to coin an L2 word or predict what and L2 word might be either from L1 or L2 respectively. Students can also try to predict what a word might be in the L2 from their current knowledge of L2. These two strategies can be modeled or practiced in the classroom. Memorization strategies Students’ awareness can be raised by getting them to think what type of learner they are in terms of storing language and retrieving language from their long term memory. In all memorization strategies, teachers will need to model how the strategy is to be performed before asking learners to try it out themselves. Examples of memorization strategies are word webs, word hooks, word shapes, visual imaging and word chains. Writing strategies Teachers can use questionnaires and the result of questionnaires to present students with the range of writing strategies available for them. Awareness in writing can also be raised with self report on a writing task. Step 6: Initial evaluation of strategy training Evaluating the effectiveness of strategy use is a complex undertaking whether the teacher is involved in eliciting the evaluation or whether the learner alone is doing the evaluation. The important consideration must be on the effectiveness of the strategy related to the cognitive processes involved in language learning. Evaluation of strategy effectiveness needs to be grounded in some sort of theory of language learning. An initial evaluation phase therefore must encourage the learner to reflect on how the underlying sub-skills and processes have been enhanced. The learner must be able to reflect not only on “can I understand better?” but also on “how is that I can understand better?”
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Step 7: Removing the scaffolding Scaffolding means supporting a course of action in a controlled way for learners, with the objective that it will become automatic and more autonomously applied, once the learner judges that action to be efficacious for their learning. Removing the scaffolding suggests slowly removing the supports and hoping that the strategy edifice doesn’t topple over and into disuse. When should a teacher stop reminding their students to try out a strategy? The optimal answer would be when each of them has proceduralized the strategy sufficiently for it to have become routine. As all learners are different and progress at dissimilar rates, in practice, it is extremely difficult. Macaro (2001) points out alternative ways of removing the scaffolding. They are: •
to provide the materials periodically
•
remind learners of the combinations of strategies they can use when embarking a task
•
give some scaffolding materials from time to time
•
ask the students periodically before an activity, to list which strategies they are going to use
Step 8 : Overview evaluation The next step in the cycle is to ask the learners for an overall impression of the strategy training programme. This can be done as below: •
through teacher led discussion
•
through group discussion with feedback
•
through questionnaires
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•
through summaries at the end of a period of diary keeping
•
through interviews with the learners either individually or in groups
In 1996, Macaro (2001) carried out a pilot study on learner strategies used by year 9 and year 10 pupils. There were the three phases to a leaner strategies study namely, an awareness raising stage, a strategy training stage and en evaluation stage. In the phase 1 questionnaire results, girls claimed to use strategies much more than boys. However, after the strategy training, boys reported having found the whole process more useful than the girls. The general response to strategy training was positive although not overwhelming. This shows that some high strategy users do not find strategy training as useful as low strategy users. Therefore, strategy training like language learning needs to be differentiated.
Step 9: Monitoring strategy use and rewarding effort Teachers who have carried out programme of strategy training will want to monitor strategy use over the longer term. They can do this by listening to students during oral interaction, observing the frequency of dictionary use by students, discussing after the end of a topic whether principles of combining strategy use are still adopted, detecting development of the learners and monitoring the general enthusiasm of the class as a whole. Research evidence seems to suggest that language learning is not an effortless process. Teachers often provide feedback evaluations of work which not only comment on what was achieved linguistically but also on the effort that the individual student has put into the work. With younger children, it is often a reward system that produces the greatest effort.
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