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

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

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Preparation Expansion Activities

Practice

Evaluation Presentation

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.

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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

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9. Monitoring strategy use and rewarding effort

8. Evaluation by students (and teachers)

1. Raise the awareness of the students

7. Gradual removal of scaffolding

2. Exploration of possible strategies available

6. Initial evaluation by students

5. Application of strategies with scaffolded support

Learner Strategies Training Cycle

3. Modeling by teacher and/or other students

4. Combining strategies for a specific purpose or specific task

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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