LEARNING STRATEGIES

WHY ARE LEARNING STRATEGIES USEFUL?

 Studying strategies, also called learner strategies, are ways of learning. Good learners use
these strategies to make their learning more efficient.

Students who analyze and reflect on their learning are more effective learners; that is, they
are more able to acquire, retain, and apply new information and skills.

Learning strategies instruction is one means of improving students' acquisition of a foreign

language. Their ability to use strategies effectively and to match them appropriately with
tasks has broad implications for learning both content and language.

The goal of learning strategies instruction is for students to become independent learners
with the ability to use strategies aptly in a variety of contexts.

HOW CAN WE CLASSIFY LEARNING STRATEGIES?

There are two main types of learning strategies, the first are strategies for planning how to
learn, and secondly strategies for learning.

 Strategies for Planning How to Learn

Advance Organization: Doing a preview of what you are going to learn.

Directing Attention: Paying attention to studying something, and not doing other things.

Selective Attention: This means studying things that you can remember more easily.

Self-management: This is understanding the conditions that help you learn, and organizing
them.

Advance Preparation: Planning and learning English that you will need for something.

Self-monitoring: Correcting yourself if you make a mistake when you are using English. This
is good for accuracy, but not for fluency.

Delayed Production: When you first start to learn a new language you may decide not to
try speaking until you have learned some vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. You may
just want to try listening first, before speaking.

Self-evaluation (Self-assessment or testing): Deciding if you have finished learning a topic

because your English is good enough to do the things you need.

Self-reinforcement: This means giving yourself a present when you have successfully
learned something.
Working Alone or with Other People: With other people you can compare ideas, criticize
ideas, get more ideas and, therefore, think about things in more detail than you can alone.

 Learning Strategies

Thinking Strategies

- Grouping: Putting things in groups and in order helps you to build a framework for
learning. Grouping also reflects the way your brain organises information.

-Imagery: This means making pictures in your mind to help you remember things.

Speaking Strategies

- Questions for Clarification: This means talking to English-speakers and asking for them to
repeat, paraphrase (summarise in different words), explain or give examples.

- Recording yourself: record yourself speaking, either on your own, or with other people.
Later you can review the recording, listen for problems .

- Form a group of people to 2ractice speaking English.

- Sing: You can sing English songs .

- Act: you can join a drama club.

- Imagine: Imaging that you are in a situation where you need to speak English.

Pronunciation Strategies

- Repetition: You can repeat a word out loud or silently to practice pronunciation. Be
careful to listen to a model to make sure that you pronunciation is correct.

- Sound: This means remembering English sounds by using sounds in your own language

Writing Strategies

-Note-taking: it's a good idea to write down the main ideas, important points, an outline or
a summary of a topic.

-Organisation: You can use a mind-map.

-Proof-reading: you can use this program to automatically check for some common
mistakes.

-Peer-review: ask a friend to read your text and comment on it. Do they understand it? Can
they suggest any improvements?
-To-do list: write a list of 10 specific problems you have with your writing. Put them in order
of seriousness or solvability.

Reading Strategies

- Transfer: This means using ideas that you already have to make learning easier

- Translation: You can read a story in a newspaper in your own language first, then read the
same story in an English newspaper. Most of the story will probably be the same, so the
story in your own language will help you to prepare for reading in English.

- Inferencing: You can also use the strategy of reading a newspaper story in your own
language first for prediction. You can predict the contents of the same story in an English
newspaper. Reading to confirm your predictions is easier than reading with no background
information.

- Prediction: You can predict from your knowledge of the world, you knowledge of how
people think, write and talk, and your knowledge of what the writer is like. For example, if
you are reading a book it is a good idea to read about the author and the contents (on the
cover or at the front of the book) to help you make predictions about what he or she
believes.

Listening Strategies

- Physical Response: You can listen to instructions about how to do something, and follow
the instructions. Relating sounds to movements helps you remember the sounds.

- Prediction: You can predict what someone is going to say by the topic of the conversation
and your knowledge of that person's opinions.

- Preparation: you can listen to the news in your own language, then listen to it in English.
Listening in your own language will help to predict what topics and vocabulary will be in the
English news.

- Motivate yourself: for example if you like movies or music, you can practise listening to
them.

Grammar Strategies

- Deduction: This means using rules to work out the answer or how to do something.

- Recombination: This means joining together things you already know to make new things.
For example, if you know that the simple past tense is used to describe things that
happened in the past which have finished, and you know that the present perfect tense is
used to describe experience, you can make a sentence that includes both of them.
- Writing your own grammar book: this can contain rules, examples (e.g. from newspapers
or magazines), your notes (e.g. on things you don't understand), lists of exceptions, etc.

- Using new grammar: after you learn some new grammar, use it in conversation or writing,
and see what your listener's or reader's reaction is.

- Get a grammar book: Choose one that you understand.

- Read and listen: to see how writers and speakers use English grammar to communicate
their ideas.

Vocabulary Strategies

- Contextualisation: This means putting new vocabulary words into sentences to help you
remember them and to test if you are using them correctly.

- Elaboration: this means relating new information to information you already know. For
example, if you know the meaning of 'information', it is easy to remember that the verb is
'to inform', and that 'informative' is an adjective, and that 'an informant' is someone who
gives information.

- Inferencing: This means using available information to predict or guess the meanings of

- Translation: You can read a story in a newspaper in your own language first, then read the
same story in an English newspaper. Most of the story will probably be the same, so the
story in your own language will help you to prepare for reading in English. For example, it
will give you vocabulary, you can use your knowledge of the story to guess what the new
vocabulary is.

- Personalisation: you can write down why the vocabulary item, where you first saw it, and
when you used it.

- Keeping your own dictionary / vocabulary book: Writing entries for the dictionary using
your own dictionary can be faster than a normal dictionary.

- Grouping: you can group words into different areas.

STRATEGIES TO PROMOTE ORAL EXPRESSION: Patricia O’Malley. (buscar document en

red)
Oral expression is a person’s ability to express wants, thoughts, and ideas meaningfully using appropriate syntactic,
semantic, pragmatic, and phonological language structures. Oral language is important because it provides the
foundation for literacy development, it is essential to academic achievement in all content areas, and it is critical for
overall success in school. As we know, a great deal of school success depends upon a child's ability to demonstrate
competency through oral communication, such as when answering questions in class or participating in group
discussions. Below are some suggestions to help a child who may be experiencing difficulty with oral expression.
HOW ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IS TAUGH?

ELD is an acronym for English Language Development. ELD is the systematic use of
instructional strategies designed to promote the acquisition of English by students whose
primary language is not English. According to Krashen, an expert in the study of second
language acquisition and the co-author of The Natural Approach, the best way to learn a
second language is through total immersion. ELD strategies support this learning method,
enabling students to acquire English language in a manner similar to the way they learned
their native language, naturally and through regular interaction with others who already
know the language.

In the natural process of language acquisition, students first develop basic communication
skills in English. The focus is on fluency and learning to speak English in a social context with
native speakers, which is why heterogeneous cooperative grouping is so important to the
Natural Approach. According to Krashen, this method allows for effortless acquisition.
Rather than getting caught up in grammar and the mechanics of language, non-native
speakers learn by interacting with English-only models. This approach is most successful
when there are two conditions:

1. Comprehensible input is provided, which means messages are made understandable and
meaningful to the learner via a variety of techniques.

2. There is a low-affective filter, which means students are made to feel comfortable and
there is little pressure to learn "it all" right now.

ELD consists of five proficiency levels: Beginning, early intermediate, intermediate, early
advanced and advanced. The four domains of ELD are: Listening, speaking, reading, and
writing. Students need to be instructed at their proficiency level for the different domains.
It is crucial to understand that students progress through the levels of proficiency at
different rates. Research has shown that it takes four to seven years to master advanced
levels of fluency.

ELD focuses on four skill areas:

1.Function: Functions are the purposes of communication. This includes social

conversations, jokes, and inquiry.

2.Form: This refers to the structure of the English language such as grammar, sentence
structure, and syntax. These are used as building blocks.

3.Fluency: Fluency is the ease in speaking the language. English language learners need
ample amount of time just practicing speaking English in order to become fluent.
4.Vocabulary: The development of a wide and varied vocabulary is essential. Research
shows that English language learners should be taught key vocabulary, or brick words, prior
to a lesson in order to assist them in their language development. A key ELD strategy is to
provide comprehensible input for the English language learner by the use of visuals, realia,
and gestures.