A Review Study in Learning Strategies Theory

Amechi Boniface Oha

Federal College of Education

Obudu, Cross River State

amaho44@hotmail.com
Abstract
The influence of first language in the learning of second language has been of an intense
debate during the past years, resulting in the prevalence of Error Analysis over Contrastive
Analysis. A great number of empirical studies indicated that neither L1 nor L2 was always
responsible for learners' errors. Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis have also shown
their own weaknesses in giving interpretations to the errors made by the learner, paving the
way for the new wave of studies into interlanguage called Learning Strategy. Learning
Strategy which has been in vogue for the last years, has witnessed differing conceptualization
and empirical outputs by different researchers and linguists from various language
backgrounds. It all boils down to the fact that there are many points in this theory which are
not clear. In the light of this, this study aims at reviewing and discussing the various views on
learning strategies in describing and explaining learners' errors in the process of language
acquisition. Therefore, theoretical foundations, theoretical assumptions, empirical works,
limitations and significance of this theory are discussed in detail. This review reveals that
learning strategy theory projects language learning or acquisition as a universal process.

Introduction
Studies in learning strategies have been wide in the area of applied linguistics. It is good, for
the scope of this review, to discuss the theory as another approach exploring its dimensions in
describing and explaining learners' errors in the process of language acquisition. Therefore,
theoretical foundations, theoretical assumptions, limitations and significance of the different
shades of the theory are discussed in this review.
For the purpose of clarity the studies has been classified into four major subcategories:

1 Conscious orientation
2 Middle-course orientation
3 Unconscious orientation
4 Research in learning strategies
1. Conscious orientation of Learning Strategies
The traditional conception of learning strategies is to view it as a conscious enterprise.
This tradition has self-instrumented as its major mode of inquiry. Apparently due to the
difficulty of its method in extrapolating from theory to practice, only few studies actually
go beyond reports to account in practical terms the establishment of learning strategies.
In one of such studies, Rubin (1975) observes learners directly and on videotapes of
language classes, and learners discussing their strategies in an inquiry into the strategies

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 adopted by successful learners. On this basis, she establishes a list of seven characteristic
she calls learning strategies of a successful learner:
(1) is a willing and accurate guesser;
(2) has strong drive to communicate ;
(3) is often uninhibited about his weaknesses in second language and ready to risk
making mistake;
(4) is willing to attend to form;
(5) practices;
(6) monitor his speech and compares it to native standard; and
(7) attends to meaning in its social context.

According to Stern (1983), Rubin developed her theory of learning strategies as she
“observed language classes directly or on videotape, listened to tapes of students discussing
their own strategies, observed herself in language learning situation, and elicited observations
from second language teachers.;

In the researcher’s view, what Rubin (1975) perceives as learning strategies are
mnemonics available to learners of any skill and certainly not language learning strategies.
Learning strategies, in the researchers’ own view, are the psycholinguistic processing
mechanism which learners employ in gaining mastery of new linguistic items.

As if to improve on Rubin’s (1975) mnemonics, stern (1975) lists the following set of
ten features which he terms learning strategy-types:

(i) Planning strategy - a person’s learning style or positive learning strategy:

(ii) Active strategy - an active approach to learning task:
(iii) Emphatic strategy- a tolerant and out-going approach to the target language and its
speakers:
(iv) Formal strategy - technical know-how of how to tackle a language:
(v) Experimental strategy - a methodical but flexible approach in developing the
language in an ordered system and constantly revising it;
(vi) Semantic strategy - constant searching for meaning;
(vii) Practice strategy – willingness to practices;
(viii) Communicative strategy - willingness to use language in real communication;
(ix) Monitoring strategy - self – monitoring and critical sensitivity to language use;
(x) Internalization strategy - developing second system and learning to think in it.

The above no doubt represents positive motivationally - induced schemas. Unmotivated

language learners will fail to use some or all the schemas.

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Tarone (1980) preoccupies herself with developing a frame-work for second language
strategies. This framework embodies two types of strategies: language learning strategy and
strategies of language use (communicative and productive strategies). Using communicative
strategies as a basic, which she defines as a “mutual attempts of two interlocutors to agree on
a meaning in a situation where the requisite meaning structure seems not to be shared; she
develops a set criteria in which to locate learning strategies within the framework:

1. A speaker desires to communicate a massage x to a listener;

2. The speaker believes the linguistic or socio-linguistic structure desired to
communicate massage x is unavailable or is not shared;
3. The speaker chooses to:
(a) Avoid- not attempt to communicate meaning x
(b) Attempt alternate to communicate massage x.

The speaker stop trying alternatives it seems to the speaker that there is shared meaning.

In this framework, learning strategy will occur when criterion 1 is lacking; that is, the basic
desire is not to communicate a massage x to a listener, but rather to learn. She cites the
following examples as activities under learning strategies, memorization, repetition, with
purpose of remembering, mnemonics, initiation of conversation with native speaker,
inferencing, spelling, etc.

Tarone’s (1980) submission raises three fundamental issues that call for closer examination.
First, Tarone’s (1980) attempt at denying learning strategy a place in the psycholinguistic
processing mechanism and rather according strategy of language use such a position is a
misinterpretation of the real processes that go on in language acquisition. Second, to Tarone
(1980) learning strategies are optional in use, thus she defines them as “an attempt to develop
linguistic and socio-linguistic competence in the target language; such attempts will manifest
in, “for example, repeating a structure or a lexical item with a view to committing it to
memory….” while Tarone agrees that the “testing of linguistic hypothesis implies a primary
intention to learn”, it is difficult to understand why she did not believe that this testing of
“linguistic hypothesis” continually occurs at the unconscious psycholinguistic level in the
process of language acquisition and use as have been variously agreed by Ravem (1974a),
Richards (1974:173) and Dulay and Burt (1974:109). Thus her remark that the primary
intention is to learn and not to communicate is missing the point because even in
communication or strategy of language use, speaker employs testing of hypothesis. Third, if
the primary intention, as Tarone (1980) states, is to learn, it will most profitable be achieved
“through the learner’s performance in the target language” (Selinker, 1972). The success will
be possible only in a meaningful output where the uttered employs authentic features (or
Interlanguage) of the target language. The inapplicability of her submission is even evident in
the inconsistency in her list of activities to be termed learning strategy. It is inconceivable
how one can initiate conversation without the basic desire begins to communicate. Thus it is

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the opinion of this researcher that Tarone’s (1980) inventory is a set of rubrics positively
motivated language learners adopt for language successes.

Stern (1983) in a later reformulation presents another set of strategy-types in what he calls
the “four basic set of strategies which, we hypothesize, good learners are likely to employ
while less efficient learners employ them only weekly, fail to maintain them concurrently, or
fail to develop them altogether” (Stern, 1983: 410-411). These are:

(i) Active planning strategy;

(ii) Academic (explicit) learning strategy;
(iii) Social learning strategy;
(iv) Affective learning strategy.

According to stern (1983), Rubin’s (1975) and stern’s (1975) lists of strategies’
comprise of more or less, similar categories divided up in somewhat different ways.
Stern (1983) observes that what Rubin (1975) and stern (1975); and indeed all other
scholars who project the same view, call

strategies are techniques which are defined as “particular form of observable learning
behavior, more or less employed by language learner (which manifest) in the study habits or
detailed procedures in dealing with specific aspect of language learning, such as, looking up
words in a dictionary” (Stern, 1983). In Stern’s (1983) reformulation, learner’s advances in
the target language are predicated on the degree of reliance on his listed set of strategies.
Oxford (1990) also lists heuristic similar to Rubin’s (1975) and Stern’s (1975 and 1983) but
apparently at a more advanced form. These heuristics are termed ‘learning strategies’. She
defines learning strategies as “operation employed by the learner to aid the acquisition,
storage, retrieval and use of information…… they are specific actions taken by the learner to
make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more transferable to new situation. The
following heuristics constitute index of her learning strategies grouped into direct and indirect
strategies.

Direct strategies:

(i) Memory strategies for remembering and retrieving new information;

(ii) Cognitive strategies for understanding and producing language;
(iii) Compensation strategies- for using language despite knowledge gap.

Indirect strategies

(i)Meta cognitive strategies- for planning and coordination the learning process;

(ii) Affective strategies- for regulating emotion while learning:

(iii) Social strategies - for learning with others.

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In the model, the learner employs direct strategies when he/she, like the performer in a stage
play works with language itself, indirect strategies when she/he, like the director of a play,
manages the context of learning (Geothal, 1993: 475-476).

What Rubin (1975) characterizes as learning strategies represents almost a replica of what her
colleagues in that group have in their different reports produced as learning strategies (cf:
Stern, 1975,1983; Bialystok, 1978; Tarone, 1980; 0xford, 1990).
Such reports together with Rubin’s (1975) study are nothing more than inventory
of characteristics of positively motivated learner of a language and in no way represents the
universal linguistic traits or processes which every language acquirer, successful or
unsuccessful, traverse deliberately; more or less unconsciously but deliberately employs in
gaining mastery of the language. Perhaps the questionable outcome of their researches and
reports might have also been informed by the method of inquiry apart from resulting from the
faulty conceptualization. Their research methodology involved setting up a design of self–
report instrument consisting of mnemonics or skills which they believe that learners’
successes in language will indicate level of ability and mastery of the language. Consequently
an inventory is established as learning strategies. What remains to be questioned about such
‘strategies’ is what happens to a learner who fails to keep to such inventory but still has
strong or compelling need to use the language. He will still be able to make utterance in the
language and will require some sort of ‘path’ or ‘life buoy’ to hold onto tenaciously as he
stumbles through the labyrinth of language. These are what to this research need to be studies
and characterized as learning strategies. And Blum – Kulka and Levenson (1983: 125) see
learning strategies as only “inferable from spoken and written interlanguage performance.”
2 Middle-Course orientation to Learning Strategy
Just as there emerged middle-course view in the conceptualization of learning strategies, such
eclectic approach has also been in empirical research into the study.
Peter’s (1977) in a longitudinal study of a child’s first language employed data to support
her proposal for a holistic approach to the analysis of child language data incorporating both
the conscious and the unconscious strategies. By observing and collecting corpuses of the
subject’s utterance in a naturalistic setting and interacting with her, Peters (1977) discovered
a consistent production of whole sentence rather than the one-word, two-word, etc, utterance
of the traditional type. This form is called gestalt while the traditional discrete word
production is called analytic. These were transformed into the two forms of strategies
available to learner at different social situations. Analytic speech or strategy is employed to
name labels, desired object or actions. Gestalt speech or strategy is employed for more

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conversationally defined contexts such as opening conversational summons, playing with
relations, requesting and discussing social objects. Thus she concluded that analytic strategies
are conscious activities and relevant to second language learning while gestalt strategies are
unconscious activities relevant to first language acquisition (i.e., dependent on primary
linguistic data).
The findings and conclusion seem contradictory as she confessed in one contest that her
subject “switched to analytic in learning her first language and gestalt in her second language
learning”. It is doubtful if a well motivated theory could have given such result; providing for
use of two sets of strategies simultaneously. Peter’s (1977) discovery, might have been
informed by the discourse level at which her investigation and analysis is carried out. She
may well have discovered a discourse strategy.
Cohen and Robbins (1976) had their interest in bridging the gap between the conscious
and the unconscious views of strategy in their study. They incorporated the examination of
the learning strategies employed by learner as subset of a bigger research into interlanguage
performance. For the first time, questionnaire was reasonably used to seek introspective
responses on the learning strategies employed by the language learner. A learning strategy
index is designed which through a described hypothetical situation seeks to discover what
strategies subject employed to accomplish tasks. Some strategies are discovered:
(i) Guessing – which is analyzed as stabilized variability’; that is, rules not clearly
developed in the subject’s mind, resulting in continued fluctuation in the use of structure;
(ii) Overgeneralization – where one structure is used in context not applicable ;
(iii) Simplification – in the justification that language is ostensibly used to communicate.
They conclude that elicitation of learning strategies through introspection can be most
profitable in investigating learners’ pattern in language acquisition.
The present study shares part of Cohen and Robin’s (1976) conviction about the
elicitation of learners’ strategies. The introspective method of data elicitation is a novel
procedure which not only forms a bridge between the conscious/second language-
strategy orientation and the unconscious/universalist strategy orientation, but is very
revealing in successfully discovering strategies of learners; typical of the
unconscious/universalist orientation.

3 Unconscious orientation

For the purpose of convenience, it becomes necessary to further classify the

Unconscious orientation of strategy into two sub-groups due to the varying themes

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identifiable within them. These sub-groups are the factor-related and the Universalist
unconscious schools.

3.1 Factor-related Unconscious orientation

The Factor-related Unconscious Orientation includes studies whose projections on

learning strategies are based on some given variables. Included in this group are Clark
(1971), Dulay and Burt (1972, 1973, 1974), Ramer (1976), Cain, Weber-Olsen and Smith
(1987). Their research orientation centers on strategies as both child-related and variability-
induced.

Learning strategies study has had its foundation on child language acquisition. Then,
it was assumed that only the child needed strategies of some sort to acquire his new
language. Following this trend, Clark (1971) conducted a study to examine the acquisition of
meaning, of a pair of relational terms - before’ and ‘after’ - by studying the strategies the
child used in interpreting them. The assumption was that relational terms were ambiguous
for children to understand while supposing that the child in such circumstances relied on
either the order-of-mention strategy or tend to acquire ‘before’ before ‘after’. She thus
hypothesized three stages of acquisition of ‘before’ and ‘after’:

(i) reliance on order-of-mention in interpreting the second positive following the main
verbs;
(ii) interpreting the sentence with ‘before’ correctly but not all sentence with ‘after’;
(iii) understanding sentences containing either conjunction.
Two tasks of oral production and comprehension of structures manipulated with the said
conjunctions were administered to native children of English speaking in nursery schools.
Results indicated that children’s understanding of the two conjunctions was proportional to
their advances in age. As predicted by the first hypothesis, children at the earliest stage used
an order–of-mention strategy in comprehension and gave non-relational answers to the
‘when questions’ in production. The second hypothesis of order of acquisition strategy was
also confirmed by the result: ‘before’ was simpler to acquire than ‘after’ and therefore was
acquired earliest. Although children at stage ‘(b)’ interpreted ‘before’ correctly, whatever
the position of the subordinate clause, only few showed evidence of understanding of ‘after’.
At stage ‘(c)’, all children interpreted ‘before’ and ‘after’ correctly and also gave answers to
‘when-question’ a correct relational reply. A conclusion was reached that the degree of
performance of children in relational structures was a function of the semantic properties of

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the two relational words under study. Thus, in the acquisition of words, the child learns the
semantic components one at a time and these components are learnt in a particular order. He
learns those components general to several different words, getting the positive values of the
semantic field before the negative values.

This generalization no doubt represents the structural semanticist’s view on

generalization of linguistic knowledge from a lexeme which constitutes a field with other
related ones; the values and function of each individual elements being dependent only on its
relations with other elements within the system. Thus, the acquisition of one lexeme is only
meaningful so far as it predicts the knowledge of its neighboring and adjacent lexeme.
However, the possibility of abstracting the volume of structures in a language one acquires
from just some discrete entities looks remote.

Also within this orientation of consignment of strategies to child language acquisition

is the belief that strategy is only general to child language acquisition, whether at first or
second language status. In fact this line of inquiry became the very first outgrowth of child
first language acquisition study. Studies were conducted to inquire if the same set of
strategies available to first language acquisition in children also obtains in second language
acquisition. Dulay and Burt (1972, 1973 and 1974) are by far the foremost exponents of this
inquiry. They have been interested in two hypotheses about child language acquisition. First,
that children recreate acquisition strategies in learning second language the same way they
use them to learn or acquire first language. Secondly, that the child organizes second
language relying on his dealings with the grammar or system of such language.

In carrying out inquiry into the first hypothesis, Dulay and Burt (1972) summarized
studies conducted to provide evidence for second language learning similar to first language
learning strategies in children. The findings show children making errors in second language
learning similar to those found in first language development. The second hypothesis also
found support in their studies, which confirmed that errors children make in L 2 acquisition
are as a result of the difficulty posed by the target language and their consequent dealing
with the difficulties within the language system rather than interference by or reliance on
their native language. To investigate this, a pilot study was conducted by Dulay and Burt
(1973) on the acquisition of eight English grammatical structures called functors on native
Spanish children learning English as a second language. Findings revealed a significant
merger with each other with respect to the degree of accuracy of structure. Also, it was
found that the errors the subject made were similar in kind to errors made by children

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learning English as a first language and not the result of interference from the learners’ first
language habit (Bailey, Madden and Krashen 1974). The conclusion was that a common
order of acquisition existed in L 1 and L2 for certain structure among children. Also
implicated in the study was that overwhelming majority of errors made by children were
developmental rather than interference oriented and thus consistent with those made by L1.

Dulay and Burt (1974) also sought to establish the pattern of acquisition in children of
diverse linguistic background. They sought to find out if the pattern of L 2 acquisition in
children of diverse linguistic background is the same with acquisition among monolingual
children. In other words, does the creative construction processes in child second language
(Dulay and Burt 1972) imply common sequence of acquisition across diverse language? The
sequence of acquisition of eleven functors was tested on native Chinese and Spanish
children learning English as a second language in a cross-sectional study. Using the
Bilingual Syntax Measure (BSM) instrument; a questionnaire instrument designed to
measure the acquisition of English/Spanish structures consisting of seven colour-type
pictures and a set of 33 questions, data were collected to measures subjects’ proficiency in
English. An extremely high correlation between sequence of Spanish and Chinese speaking
children in English was recorded, consistent with the prediction of the creative construction
hypothesis. The result provided a strong support for a universal order of acquisition of
certain structure among children exposed to natural speech, irrespective of their first
language background. Their conclusion was that the study provided a strong indication that
universal cognitive mechanisms were the bases for child’s organization of target language
and that it was the L2 system rather than L1 system that guided the acquisition process”. On
the nature of this mechanism (strategy), they stated,

“we believe that universal strategies should be sufficiently abstract and comprehensive so as
to predict acquisition order based on different types of language inputs such as language
other than English or type of speech exposure other than natural language."

The finding is true for the prediction of the same set of acquisition strategies for
varying language data that the child is exposed to. No doubt, Dulay and Burt’s work on child
language acquisition is monumental as they provide the lead or springboard for the study of
the processes of language acquisition. However, their pre-occupation with child language
acquisition limits the usefulness of their work to the present study.

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 This wave of variation in strategy both in conceptualization, classification and
application has also led some researchers into the belief that there exist variables that
interact to alter the nature of strategy, given the situation. Such variables which lend
themselves for exploration include gender (Ramer, 1976) and age/length of exposure to
language learning (Cain, Weber-Olsen and smith, 1987).

Ramer (1976) from her study is convinced that factors operate to alter or differentiate
strategies. In a longitudinal study to investigate the emerging syntax of children, she found
out that time of exposure (or age) influences the rate of acquisition while gender accounts
for the speed and rapidity of language development. To infer this, seven children falling into
gender groups and age-groups form the subjects of the study. Data were collected from the
subjects in a naturalistic free-playing setting on their use of grammatical subject, verb and
complement structures. Analysis of the semantic intent of each utterance was carried out
based on three disambiguating criteria:

(i) the non-linguistic context;

(ii) the preceding adult utterances; and
(iii) the child’s own utterances immediately following the utterance under analysis.

Ramer’s (1976) study indicated that chronological age does not play significant
differentiating role in the syntactic emergence of the subject, rather the rapidity of
acquisition varied along gender continuum; girls showed to be more rapid developers in
syntax than boys.

Since Ramer (1976) strongly believed in the conscious manifestation of learning

strategy and thus explains away some traits of learning strategy as ‘learning style’ (Ramer,
1976:50:Fn.1) it is not surprising that her data failed to indicate variation induced by age.
Rather she reported that the measure employed was rate of acquisition or the number of
month from the emergence of two-word utterance until syntactic criterion was met, rather
than chronological age of the child at the time when this criterion was reached. This is
because the unconscious strategy oriented method she uses but labeled learning style in her
inquiry informs the direction of the finding.

Cain, Weber-Olsen and Smith (1987) conducted a study to investigate whether adult
English speakers learning Spanish will follow the same strategies in acquiring the category
of noun gender and its functors in Spanish as native Spanish children. They sought to find
out to what extent the adult L2 learners aligned along a continuum for language learning

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strategies approximating normal L1 development. They employed two sets of subjects;
children acquiring Spanish natively and adult acquiring Spanish as a second language for
comparison. Each group of twenty subjects was further classified into five sub-groups,
according to age for the native Spanish children, and according to the length of exposure to
the language for the adults. Five sets of tasks - all testing the use of the appropriate articles
an adjectives marked for gender in Spanish - were administered in a single experimental
session. Result showed that the linguistically most proficient children were the oldest age-
group while the linguistically most proficient adults were the group most exposed to the
language and they both performed significantly better than the youngest L1 group and the
beginning adult group respectively. Adults heavily rely on semantic strategy while the
children predominantly show reliance on phonological strategy - the use of semantic strategy
is progressively proportional to the children’s advancement in age. The oldest children are
more adults–like in their use of semantic strategy. They conclude that a continuum of
development in the acquisition and use of Spanish noun gender exists whereby their uses
improve with experience and exposure both in child L1 and adult L2.

Two implications emerge from the study. First, children are not after all better
language acquirers than adults as there existed no significantly better performance from
them. Second, the universally similar cognitive strategies guiding language acquisition are
discounted: adult follow strategies different from children’s. It is thus suggested in the study
that the different patterns charted for the two groups might have been caused by the fact
“that one’s level of cognitive development and previous linguistic experience may influence
the way in which learners focus upon a given aspect of morpheme class” (Cain, Weber –
Olsen and smith, 1987). Cain, Weber- Olsen and Smith’s (1987) study, a replication of
cooks (1973) in focus and method on children, however differ in its finding and conclusion
as it believes that age variability is fundamental to language acquisition (learning strategies).
Larsen–Freeman and Storm (1977) maintain that second language acquisition research
cannot rely upon the independent yardstick of chronological age in their research. This is
because its influences might fluctuate depending on the learner’s proficiency level.

3.2 Universalist Unconscious Orientation

The second group of unconscious strategies orientation, the universalist unconscious group
includes that within the new wave of interest in universal grammar (UG) framework
projecting universal view of learning strategies, just as the new wave of grammatical
investigation focusing attention on the universal properties as bases on which knowledge of

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language develops. Quite a few studies have been conducted to chat a holistic path, or adopt
a universal set of strategies for all learner; both first and second language, child or adult
learner (Cook, 1973; Bailey, Madden and Krashen, 1974; Scott and Tucker, 1974;
d’anglejan and Tucker 1975; Fathman, 1974; Taylor, 1975; Cooper, Olstein,Tucker and
Waterbury 1975, Gaas, 1979; smith and Wilson, 1979; Hoek, Ingram and Gibson, 1985).
Most of these studies are in adult language acquisition designed to compare with established
child-strategy index to provide evidence of universal strategy.

Cook (1973) in a comparative study of child first language and adult second language
acquisition investigated whether adults learn second language in the same way native
children acquire their first language. She hypothesized that any constant difference between
native children and adult foreign language learner may be the accidental by-product of
teaching rather than the inevitable consequence of two different processes. In two separate
experiments, the performance of a group of foreign adult learners’ understanding and
production of relative clauses were compared with those of a group of native children.
Result showed that both groups tackled the task of comprehension and production of relative
clauses in much the same way. The assumption that foreign adults approach language in
ways fundamentally different from native children was disproved by the findings.

Using another set of tests, the study also measured the syntactic development of adult
against some identified progresses in children using comprehension of sentences with
similar surface but different underlying structures. The result placed the adult at the same
developmental stage with their child counterpart; according to length of exposure to the
language;

i primitive rule users;

ii intermediates;

iii passers.

The findings indicated similarities in the patterns native children and foreign adult
learners perceive structures. Both initially:

1 Perceive surface–structure objective as deep structures.

2 employed hit–or miss strategies ; and finally
3 become aware of deep and surface structure.

Cook’s (1973) findings are consistent with Clark’s (1971) identified developmental stages of
languages acquisition pattern in children.
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Cook (1973) thus concluded that a similarity existed in ways both native children and
foreign adult learners understood sentences at different stages of development.

A significant point in the study is equating age variable in children with length of
exposure to languages in the adult learners. Thus the two groups of learners have the
variables of age and length of exposure to the language held constant and virtually subjected
to the same condition. However, it seems that language structures are so diverse and
complex that conclusion on what constitutes strategies based on a mere manipulation of one
or two discrete structures render the result of such study at best ad hoc. In addition, language
learners and users do not acquire languages structures–by–structure, and particular structures
cannot serves as model for acquisition of another. Larsen-Freeman and Strom (1977) also
maintain that learners do not progress linearly in the acquisition of languages.

Bailey, Madden and Krashen (1974) in a seemingly unintended counter to Dulay and
Burt (1974) conducted a study on the natural sequences of acquisition among adult subjects
of diverse linguistic background. Dulay and Burt’s (1974) study is on child language
acquisition and suggests common order of languages acquisition for functors in children of
diverse linguistics background. Bailey, Madden and krashen (1974) drew two hypotheses
which stated that:

(i) adult learning English as a second language will show agreement with each other in
the relatives difficulty of functors in English;
(ii) the adult ranking will be similar to that of the child learning English as a second
rather than to that of children learning English as a first language.

Using the BSM instrument, data were collected by eliciting the use of eight English functors
whose accuracy of use was measured. They discovered a significant correlation with relative
accuracy of functor words among all groups, confirming the first hypothesis which stated
that adult learners would use common set of strategies for second language learning. For the
second hypothesis, result of Dulay and Burt (1973) was correlated with the study and a
significant merger was recorded. Relative accuracy in adult group was quite similar to those
of children learning English as a second language. Adults process linguistic data in the same
ways young children learning second language do. They therefore counter Dulay and Burt
(1974) who believe strategies are only child- related. They conclude that majority of error
are intra- rather than inter-lingual; that is, there was evidence of universal language
processing mechanism at work.

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 However, their inference that a set of invariant ordering exist; one for child L 1
acquisition and another for child and adult L2 acquisition is suspect. In addition, the study
equally conformed to the old-beaten tradition of reporting findings that establish common
set of strategies both for L1 and L2 acquisitions but falling to characterize these strategies.
And even when such processes as ‘intralingual’ are glossed as strategies, they are not
reduced to specifics to throw adequate light on what the phenomena are.

Another area of research into universal strategies of language acquisition has been in
the investigation of the transitional competence of the leaner. Scott and Tucker (1974)
conducted a longitudinal study of 22 native Arabs learning English to examine and describe
their approximative system, both in speech and writing. Having obtained both oral and
written corpuses from the adult subjects in two phases, T–unit measure was used to analyze
the word length of sentences or clauses whereby the number of errors of a particular type
was measured as a function of the total word length. Larsen–Freeman and Storm (1977)
define T – unit as “minimal terminable unit … minimal as to length, and each …
grammatically capable of being terminated with a capital letter and a period.” Each group’s
error was calculated to represent a hierarchy of difficulties of the learners in their attempts at
the target language. Errors were discovered in learners’ use of verbs, prepositions, articles
and relative clauses. The correlated result of the two phases in verb errors reveals improved
usage of the structure along the continuum of three stages:

Stage i consists of learning to put in tense carrier and recognizing that verb
should be marked;

Stage ii consists of learning how to mark the verbs; while

Stage iii is using the different markers correctly.

They concluded that learners’ performances in the tasks were frequent enough to suggest
that rule-generated language system was on course.

Significant as the study was in identifying and classifying learners’ verb acquisition
pattern, it was faulted for its inability to infer from its findings the strategies learners apply
at each stage as implied by the caption.

Within this scope of investigation into the developmental process of language

acquisition is also d’angeljan and Tucker (1975) who conducted an experimental study to
establish whether the developmental pattern adult learners follow in the acquisition of

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complex structures is the same as that already established in children’s first language
acquisition.

The study was carried out at two levels of proficiency; comprehension and production.
The study hypothesized that first and second language learning will employ the same set of
strategies. Forty adult subjects learning English were drawn into equal halves of ‘beginners’
and ‘advanced’ with a group of native speakers as control. Using ambiguous constructions
grouped into four sets of tasks, subjects’ ability to process the constructions was sought. A
similar developmental pattern was discovered for the acquisition of tested structures. Many
subjects misinterpreted structures in the same way as young English speaking children do,
and this established similarity in the order of difficulties for both the children and the adult
learners. They thus concluded that the degree of linguistic complexity in sentences initiates
the order of acquisition of certain grammatical structures and that this factor transcended
both first and second language learning conditions. Also discovered were some learning
strategies common to both sets of learners; strategies that were hitherto attributed to first
language processes. For examples, less advanced learners rely more on semantics rather than
syntactic clue in interpreting ambiguous sentences. The learners were not processing
structure by relating them to similar structures in their in natives languages. They were
rather dealing directly with data of the target language. Second language learners interpreted
sentences in the target language by making use of basic language processing principles such
as applying broad general rules, and this is consistent with discoveries in child language
acquisition.

d’ anglejan and Tucker’s (1975) study, an adaptation of Chomsky’s (1969) study on

child language acquisition reduplicates Dulay and Burt’s (1973) attempt at assigning a set of
strategies to children learning second language while ignoring the process at the adult-
learners level. However, just as observed with cook (1973), the study faults in merely
manipulating discrete structures to determine language learning strategies. There is no
means of inferring whether the apparent uniformity in learning is structure- induced; that is,
the result became so because the structures manipulated allowed it. It is possible that the
structures used caused the uniformity due to their inability to discriminate between first and
second language learner in the study. Finally, the ‘universal strategies’ are glossed over
without actually being described.

Fathman (1975) conducted a study that refutes the factor-induced orientation of some
researcher on learning strategies. She was interested in investigating the roles variables play

15
in strategy use, using the age variable as focus. However, her findings reveal that age does
not interact to vary strategy-use. In the study, subjects who were children of diverse
linguistic background learning English as a second language were tested on age and order-
of-acquisition of English structures basic to learning English as a second language. Results
showed some relationships between age and rate of learning in certain structures. The older
group performed significantly better on morphology and syntax than the younger group.
Thus the older group learns the structures at faster rate than the younger one. On the other
hand, the younger group scored significantly higher rate in phonology and in overall
acquisition than the older group even with the same amount of exposure. When correlated,
the result showed that while certain aspects of language learning such as the rate of learning
change with age, the process remains constant for children of different age in terms of order
of acquisition.

Few researches explored the nature of strategies. Among these scholars are Taylor
(1975) and Gaas (1979). Taylor (1975) explored the relationship between ove-
generalization and transfer, and the degree to which elementary and intermediate students
rely on them while learning English. Designed to investigate how adult native speakers of
Spanish use syntactic overgeneralization and native language transfer in their acquisition of
English, and the relationship between errors of the two types, four assumptions were made:

1. Second language learners of English make errors which are attributable to the structure
of their native language and which, therefore, cannot be predicted by the Contrastive
Analysis Hypothesis.
2. Many errors which second language learners make can be attributed to inherent
difficulties and / or irregularities in English itself and can be explained by a strategy of
target language syntactic over-generation.
3. Over-generalization errors are neither random nor idiosyncratic, and they can be
enumerated within a limited taxonomy of error types.
4. Errors which appear to indicate a reliance on native language structures (native language
transfer) are more common among elementary speakers of English than they are among
intermediate speakers. Errors which appear to be attributable to over generalization are
more common among intermediate speakers than they are among elementary speakers.

Grouping his subjects into two proficiency levels of ‘elementary’ and ‘intermediate’
learners’ he explored if reliance on strategies was a function of learner’ degree of
proficiency. The task centered on subjects’ manipulations of auxiliary (aux) and verb

16
 phrases (VP) in eight sentence-types. Error analysis was used to organize corpuses into
processes and strategies learner rely on. To obtain such information, a context or frame
has to be designed to ensure that:

(i) Learners form a desired target language structures;

(ii) Learners’ mastery of the semantics of the structure was met.

Thus the frame would ensure that structures provided would reveal insight into the operation
of the learners in the language. Subjects were asked to translate the English structures into
their native French language. A large number of similarities was discovered to be common
with the ‘elementary’ group which lead Taylor to suggest that proficiency in English leads to
greater use of Overgeneralization and less use of transfer strategies; a process which
discriminate between the intermediate and elementary groups in that continuum.

The study cannot be said to be wholly supportive of the claim of universal underlying
mechanism as it believes in the influences of transfer of the native language, at least to
certain degree. How does the influence of native transfer manifest in child language
acquisition, for instance, if the process lends itself to universal principles? A significant
contribution of the study is the consideration in the choice of means of data elicitation. The
task chosen provides means for obtaining the desired output. This researcher sees the method
as an innovative departure from the traditional method of using discrete structures to explore
learning strategies. The reliance on translation however can negate the universal principles as
subject can rely on native language transfer in such instance.

Gaas (1979) conducted a study on the acquisition of relative clauses by adult second
language learners of diverse linguistic backgrounds to determine which language
phenomena are transferable and which are not. She also sought to establish the roles of
language universal in language transfer. Native languages of the subjects were classified
as to whether they exhibited particular relative clause variables. If a subject differed in
statistically significant way from others with regard to the use or lack of use of the
particular variable in English, and if such differences reflected in the native language
pattern, it was considered to be evidence of transfer.

Result did not show any significant differences in the errors committed by the subject
in English morphology. The result suggested that marker variability was not a relevant
factor in difficulties in adults L2 acquisition. The finding indicated that transfer is
consequent upon target languages facts which set language distance and surface language

17
 phenomena. Subjects rely on the accessibility hierarchy (AH) of the relative clause where
by the learners’ ease in the use of relative clause (RC) was predictable on the basis of the
position on the hierarchy. Gaas (1979: 330) arranged the hierarchy in the following way:

SU > DO > 1O > OBL > GEN > OCOMP;

Where:

SU = Subject

DO = Direct object

1O = Indirect object

OBL = Oblique (in English, object of preposition)

GEN = Genitive

OCOMP = Object of comparative

> = More accessible than.

The ease decreases right ward from the subject. Learners were found to rely on rule of
generalization rather than native transfer in the accessibility hierarchy. The easiest position
to relativize is the subject (SU) while the most difficult position to relativize in the hierarchy
is the object of comparative (OCOMP).
Gaas (1979:334) then drew two hypotheses that:
First, the more accessible positions in the hierarchy (i.e., the subject
position) should be produced with greater frequency than the less
accessible ones (i.e., the lower position ended by object of comparatives
(OCOMP);
Second, the more accessible positions should be produced with greater accuracy than the less
accessible ones. Evidence was adduced from Keenan’s (1975) and Faber’s (1977) data from
native English speaker and Gaas (1979a) data from adult L2 English learners to substantiate
the first hypothesis. For the second hypothesis, results of sentence combining tasks reported
in figure 1 of the study were used to provide evidence. Thus Gaas (1979) concluded that
“Since this is true for all language groups tested here, it suggests that the areas of difficulty
for these groups can be predicted on the basis of universal properties of RC’s rather than on
the basis of language specific properties.” To Gaas (1979) language transfer will be
determined by three factors:
(i.) the surface features involved (evidence in phonological transfer);

18
 (ii.) the distance between the relevant structure in the target language (TL) and the
transferred pattern in the interlanguage; and
(iii.) closeness of the interlanguage form to the underlying logical structure (i.e.,
the structure’s contiguity to the semantic representation of the construction under
consideration.

The universality of pattern of acquisition has also been investigated on.

Cooper, Olstain, Tucker and Waterbury (1979) extended d’anglejan and Tucker’s (1975)
investigation of the acquisition of complex English structures by French Canadian
soldiers to adult learners of English in Egypt and Israel. In the study, linguistic setting,
attitude and relatedness of language to English formed the variables that were
manipulated. While English stood more chances of being learnt in ‘naturalistic’ setting in
d’anglejan and tucker’s (1975) study, primary opportunity to learn English in Cooper,
Olstain, Tucker and Waterbury’s (1975) setting was in formal classroom setting. Attitude
to learning English among d’anglejan and Tucker’s (1975) setting was that of
ambivalence because even though its usefulness was acknowledged, it nonetheless
represented a threat to their native languages. On the other hand Cooper, Olstain, Tucker
and Waterbury’s (1979) population had positive attitudes towards English. Also of
difference between the two studies was relatedness of native language to English. While
French and English are closely related, the Semitic languages of Cooper, Olstain, Tucker
and Waterbury’s (1979) study have no genetic relationship to English. It was their belief
that if the same patterns of response could be established between the subjects of the two
studies, they would be more firmly grounded in their attempts to infer universal properties
of second languages acquisition.

Seven groups of subjects were involved in the study - four in Cairo and three
in Israel. The Cairean groups were drawn up according to their proficiency level - from
one to four. The first two groups (groups I and II) came from students on full-time degree
course but who enrolled into the intensive English languages course at the English
languages institutes of the America university, Cairo. The last two groups (groups 3 and
4) came from adults enrolled into the Evening Courses as foreign language at the division
of public services of the American university. The Israeli subjects formed the last three
groups of groups - 5, 6 and 7. While groups 5 and 6 were in their eleventh (junior) year of
high school in Jerusalem with highly rated ability in English, group 7 were students

19
 enrolled in preparatory programme for high school granduates for entrance to university,
given at the Tel- Aviv University.

Findings revealed that the Egyptian and Israeli students not only performed
similarly to one another but also to the French Canadian groups of d’anglejan and Tucker’s
(1975) study. Subjects frequently interpreted complex structures in a fashion similar to that
of children learning English natively and this occurred even when there were differences
between the structures in English and the mother tongue (Cooper, Olstain , Tucker and
Waterbury, 1979:272). They grappled with the English material directly without recourse to
their first language. Also implicated by the study was that the process of first and second
language acquisition are similar and that the creative construction hypothesis can be applied
to both.

Smith and Wilson (1979), in reporting other studies, identify the following
strategies:

i maximization of harmonic or assimilatory processes :

ii minimization of sequence of consonants by deletion of one of the consonants or

insertion of contrasts between them;

iii decrease in the number of phonological contrast made in adult language;

iv Simplification of grammar/elimination of morphological contrasts.

Description of method of data collection and the subject that yielded the findings were not
revealed, although by all indications, the study was based on child language acquisition.
Furthermore, the result was a set of universal unconscious strategies.

In another report, Littlewood (1984) classified learners’ strategies in the following

pattern:

(i) Over-generalization – use of what the learners know about the target languages to
where it does not apply;

(ii) Transfer - the use of previous knowledge in mother tongue to where it does not apply
in the new languages;

(iii) Simplification - the elimination of many redundant items in conveying to make

production easier and still understandable to the recipient.

20
 Little wood (1984) claimed the existence of universal underlying principles of “actively
constructing rules from the data encountered, and gradually adapting these rules in the
direction of the target language system.”

For Hoek, Ingram and Gibson (1985), the concern was the determination of
the possible grammatical and linguistic processes which cause some given strategies. They
examined the possible errors that can initiate the strategy of over-extension. The study
employed a child as subject in a longitudinal research. To explore the problem, the following
variables were examined:

(i) the growth of her spontaneous receptive vocabulary;

(ii) the growth of her spontaneous productive vocabulary;
(iii) the phonological features of her spontaneous spoken words;
(iv) the use of over- extension in:
(a) comprehension and
(b) production;
(v) her ability to acquire nonsense words ( that separate into those within her productive
phonology and those outside of it) in:
(a) comprehensive and
(b) production; and
(vi) Any use of over- extension under controlled condition of the above nonsense words.

Data were collected on the child’s comprehension. The child’s responses to the tasks
presented, such as looking at, indicating through pointing and picking up objects or acting
out an action, were recorded. For the production ability a task of (16) sixteen nonsense
words were presented to elicit utterances from the subject. There were six sources of over-
extension discovered or confirmed:

(i) the use of a known word for an unknown one;

(ii) the use of a known older word for a more recently acquired word;
(iii) the incomplete knowledge of defining features of two or more similar meaning
words;
(iv) the over-extension of a preferred word;
(v) the use of phonologically simple word (in production) for one that is more
difficult;
(vi) The use of a word for a more natural class than one in its adult meaning.

21
 All the findings were indicative of the subject grappling with the target
language features and not a carry-over effects or features.

In conclusion the reviewed studies under the unconscious school of learning

strategies establish learning strategies as universal underlying principles which language
learner of any level utilizes in gaining mastery into the target language.

4 Researches in Learning Strategies

Research effort in learning strategy has also concentrated on the development of index of
strategy. Larsen–Freeman and Strom (1977) developed a second language acquisition
index of development to obtain a classifiable schema for indentifying learners’
respective proficiency levels. By grading learners of diverse linguistic background in one
of the five proficiency levels of poor, fair, average, good and excellent through a
composition task, utterance length measure was obtained after calculating the number of
words and sentences made by each subject. To be able to objectively use a measure as an
index of development, measure of length of utterance was adopted. The number of
words and the number of sentences were counted in each subject’s composition. The
numbers of error free T–unit was also counted. The T–unit, when applied to the
measurement of learners’ proficiency discriminated highly among the five groups. A
progression in learning among the subjects was recorded whereby spelling improved
with Proficiency and reduction in the number of errors. Conclusion was therefore made
that learners were acquiring a system as opposed to learning to spell individual words.
Thus the average length of T–unit and total number of error–free T–units per
composition were established as index for measuring second language acquisition, and
by implication, strategy-use. Larsen-Freeman and Strom (1977) believed that with the
development of this index of second language acquisition, second language learner can
be appropriately graded. In their view:
Second language acquisition researchers usually do report the
target language proficiency of our subject, but they use very
subjective labels. They identify learners as beginning, intermediate
or advanced with respect to the target language. Such classification
schema is much too vague and relative to convey to others the
levels of competence of a particular group of learners.

22
 This in part bears out the reservation earlier made in this study on the findings of
the many studies claiming universal underlying strategies.

The index is acknowledged for being comparable to the mean length

utterance (MLU) of first language acquisition research. Mean length utterance is
developed for first language acquisition research to measure the linguistic
development of subjects by calculating the number of morphemes in an
utterance. The unsuitability of this index to second language research is that
learner is capable of producing utterances which are more than a few morphemes
in length shortly after an initial contact with the target language (Larsen–
Freeman and Strom, 1977: 123 – 124).

However, as confessed by the researchers, the limit of measure of length

and error–free T–unit as instrument for second language research only to written tasks
narrow its usefulness in the determination of strategy.

Oxford (1989) developed the strategy Inventory for Language Learning

(SILL). This instrument consisted of 80–item questionnaire employed to rate
the following strategies in learners:

(i) Memory strategies;

(ii) Cognitive strategies;
(iii) Compensation strategies;
(iv) Meta cognition strategies;
(v) Social strategies;
(vi) Affective strategies;
(vii) Mean strategies-use.

The inventory; a self-report instrument, asked learner to react to a series of the above
strategy descriptions in terms of how often they used each (always or almost,
generally, sometimes, generally not, never or almost never).

In a study, Ehrman and Oxford (1995) employ SILL to explore learning

strategies which formed a subset of a bigger study on language learning success.
Findings revealed that learning strategies used in the sub-sample were moderate, high
in the overall. No strategy-group was reported as the highest “always or almost always
used”. while non equally was reported as lowest “generally not used”, or “never”, or
”almost never used”, the most frequently used strategies are “compensation strategies”

23
(guessing, paraphrasing), “generally used”. According to Ehrman and oxfords (1995),
“this is followed immediately by the ‘generally used’ social strategies (mean 3.15, SD
0.65) and cognitive strategies (mean 3.15, SD 0.61). In the ‘sometime used’ ranges are
the following strategy categories: metacognitive memory and affective”.This of course
provides a framework for the conscious strategy advocates.

5 Conclusions

Through the present review, a pattern of studies in learning strategies has emerged.
Most studies on learning strategies have in most cases been mere pronouncements
made that in most cases do not go beyond the brilliant captions (Scott and Tucker,
1794; Bailey, Maddan and Krashen, 1975; d’angeljan and Tucker, 1975). In some
other cases strategies have been explored through discrete structures (Clark, 1971;
cook, 1973; d’angeljan and Tucker, 1975, etc). Strategies have also been studied
depending on what the phenomena represent to the researchers (Rubin, Stern, 1975
and 1983; Tarone, 1980; oxford, 1990; etc).There are yet others who study it from the
Factor-induced point of view (Ramer, 1976; Cain, Weber – Olsen and Smith; 1987,
etc) and still others who conclude that strategies are child – related enterprise (Clark,
1971, Dulay and Burt, 1972 and 1974; etc).
Also revealed in the review was the conceptualization of the term;
‘strategy’. The conscious advocates perceive strategy in its literal sense; hence its
conscious denotation in conceptualization as plans one makes to attack a target
(Rubin, 1975, etc). The unconscious group, on the other hand, conceives of strategy as
being operationally defined and thus a correlate of a much deeper universal underlying
process going on as the learner grapples with the data of the new language (Dulay and
Burt, 1972; Slobin, 1971; Taylor, 1974; Smith and Wilson, 1979; etc). The conscious
orientation also, even in its parochial conceptualization of learning strategy has
however been broad in its index of what the phenomenon represents. Thus, in its
belief that strategies are second language-related and as such, consciously learnt, the
following for it, constitute the enterprise: mnemonics, tips or manuals (probably at the
finger-tips of the learner) which are recalled in learning the target language, perhaps
like mathematical tables employed by student to solve mathematical problems or gain
mathematical knowledge. For the unconscious advocates, even when it perceives the
phenomenon as belonging to the subconscious, and only discoverable through the
examination of outputs by the learner, and available at any level of language being

24
learnt, its inquiry through bits and pieces of language structures to justify this
underlying strategy weakens its applicability.
The dichotomy in conceptualization of learning strategies bears some
implications on both method of inquiry on learning strategies and the nature of
learning strategy. First, while the conscious strategy school preoccupied itself with the
development of a preconceived trait and are out to test how subject utilize them which
reports the learners’ progress in the target language, the unconscious group develops
language test frame which subjects thread through in their production. From such
tasks a deduction is made about their progress and strategies in the acquisition of the
target language. Second, the conscious advocates provide index, and through the self-
report instrument, pre-empt the direction of the research. Self-report instrument in
research has been criticized as suspect for its ‘social desirability response bias’
(SDRB) syndrome; that is, “a tendency to answer in the way the subject thinks the
researcher would like, or show himself or herself as being in some socially acceptable
way, a ‘good person’” (Ehrman and Oxford, 1995). With the unconscious advocate on
the other hand, a trend is observed whereby researchers align along two groups – the
Factor-related strand and the Universalists. For the Factor-related strand, factors exist
which can influence the outlook of strategies. These factors include age, gender, etc,
while others in this group stoically maintain that when strategies are sought for, they
should be sought from child language acquisition process. The Universalist, however,
maintains that strategy is universal to all language acquisition regardless of age or
level. Here, a distinction is made between the superficial learning of “words and
phrase” (of: Dulay and Burt, 1972) and the learning of “rules of construction”.
The present study considers it a serious gap that no study has concentrated
primarily on identifying, classifying and characterizing learning strategies from an
interlanguage system. Such studies in diverse language systems are the only means of
developing an inventory of learning strategies.

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