Abstract
One dictionary defines strategy as “the skillful planning and management of anything”; another as “the use of artifice or finesse in carrying out a project.” Such definitions provide a general orientation for the topic of this chapter, although they encompass rather more than is useful for our purposes. Closer to home is Levin’s use of the term in the context of prose-learning strategies, where he defines strategy as “any auxiliary materials or learner activities designed to enhance processing of text” (Levin, 1982). But that definition, too, is a bit off the mark because we are dealing here not with learning or memory for prose material expressed in language already familiar to the reader or listener, but rather with language learning de novo —the acquisition of the unfamiliar vocabulary units or syntactic structures of a first or second language. So let us say that language-learning strategy refers to the skillful planning and management of language learning as carried out by the learner or language teacher. Such strategies include the use of auxiliary materials or learner activities designed to enhance language learning. This will serve as our orienting definition, but later it will be useful to distinguish further between informal and formal strategies and settings, mnemonic and nonmnemonic strategies, and comprehension versus production as strategy goals. Following a brief explanation of these distinctions, I present a schema for classifying language-learning strategies and then go on to fill in the schema with examples of relevant strategies and an evaluation of research evidence where this is available.
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References
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Paivio, A. (1983). Strategies in Language Learning. In: Pressley, M., Levin, J.R. (eds) Cognitive Strategy Research. Springer Series in Cognitive Development. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5519-2_7
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