Methodology in Language Learning: Assessment

Learning strategy use and, more generally, self-regulated learning, are typically measured by self-report questionnaires. These instruments are based on the assumption that strategy use and strategic learning are related to an underlying aptitude because items ask respondents to generalize their actions across situations rather than referencing singular and specific learning events.

Although the concept of learning strategy has been influential in developments in language teaching methodology, the unresolved theoretical problems surrounding the concept and its measurement made it less appropriate for research purposes: In the absence of a tight definition, it is unclear what different researchers mean by the term language learning strategy and the actual language learning strategy measures presented in the various studies tend not to have sufficient psychometric properties. The logical question is, then, whether or not we need to abandon the concept altogether.

Various mnemonic strategies were developed to improve students’ paired-associate learning and, as a result, the conception of the ‘learner’ shifted from a passive receptacle for knowledge to an active, self-determined individual who processes information in complex ways. Learning strategies offered a unique insight into the mechanisms of the learning process in general and they also represented a significant mutable factor in promoting academic achievement for students. Following the ‘discovery’ of learning strategies, several attempts were made in the 1980s to theorize the concept.

Thus, skills are, broadly speaking, the things we can do (constrained by our ability), whereas strategies and tactics involve the conscious decisions to implement these skills. Although this distinction appears to make sense, it still leaves the exact level of analysis of strategies and skills open: At which conceptual level are the processes that are governed by strategies and skills best conceived? Are we talking about neurological, cognitive, or behavioral processes?

How can something be either a thought or a behavior or an emotion? These issues have been seen as distinct aspects of human functioning in psychology and it is difficult to accept the existence of an entity that simply cuts across them. And how do knowledge systems, emotional states/processes, cognitive operations, and motor skills interplay in producing action?

These are all valid questions that would need to be answered in order to use the term learning strategy in a scientifically rigorous sense. However the currently available neurobiological information about the nature of concepts such as knowledge, skills, ability, and, more generally, learning appears to be insufficient to define precisely the class of learning behaviors that constitute learning strategy use.

One thing seems to be increasingly clear and that is that, across learning contexts, those learners who are proactive in their pursuit of language learning appear to learn best. After researchers started to accept that

examining the strategies that these ‘good’ learners applied was not a fruitful direction, they set out to capture the secret of the strategic learners’ ‘proactiveness’ by focusing on the self-regulatory process and the specific learner capacity underlying it.

That is, what makes strategic learners special is not so much what they do as the fact that they choose to put creative effort into improving their own learning and that they have the capacity to do so. One may feel that this change has been a mere face-lift and research into self-regulation carried on doing the same kind of investigations as before by simply replacing the term strategy (which seemed to cause most of the confusion) with a trendy new metaphor.

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University of Oxford - post gradual studies 2009 'English Language Teaching'

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