- The Origins of the Term "Strategy"
- Learner Strategies and Learning Strategies
- Defining the Term "Strategy"
- Avoiding confusion
- Plans or processes?
- Conclusion
- References
The importance of learning strategies is now widely recognized in all areas of education. As Oxford says, "under various names such as learning skills, learning-to-learns skills, thinking skills, and problem-solving skills, learning strategies are the way students learn a wide range of subjects, from native language reading through electronics trouble-shooting to new languages" (1990:2-3). This article reviews some definitions and debates about the nature of learning strategies within the field of applied linguistics and ELT.
The Origins of the Term "Strategy"
The word "strategy" comes from the Greek "strategos", a root that originally meant "trick" or "deception". The Greeks later used the term to describe army generals: a general was one who could trick the enemy. The term first became current in English in the late 18th and early 19th century when "it denoted the overall military and psychological plans that a general made for a campaign" (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1985).
The term was first used in Cognitive Psychology in 1956 by Bruner, Goodnow and Austin in a paper presented at a meeting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was an auspicious meeting. The paper, which contained the first systematic attempt to consider concept formation from a cognitive perspective (Eysenck and Keane 1990:7), was presented alongside a preliminary paper by Chomsky on his theory of language, George Miller's paper on the magic number 7 in short term memory and Newell Shaw and Simon's "General Problem Solver", a computational model from which later theories relating to problem-solving and production systems are derived.
In Applied Linguistics, strategy research dates back to 1966 when Aaron Carton published his study, "The Method of Inference in Foreign Language Study". This was followed in the mid 1970s by a series of empirical studies of "good" language learners, notably by Rubin (1975), Stern (1975) and Naiman, Fröhlich, Stern and Todesco (1978). Since the late 1970s applied linguistics has turned more and more to cognitive science to provide the theoretical framework for language learning and this has led to valuable research into a whole range of strategies used in vocabulary learning tasks (Cohen and Aphek 1980, 1981), reading comprehension (Brown et al 1983, Chipman Segal and Glaser 1985; Dansereau 1985) and writing (Flower and Hayes 1981) to name only a few.
Learner Strategies and Learning Strategies
A distinction is sometimes made in Applied Linguistics between learner strategies and learning strategies. Tarone (1981), for example, distinguishes three sets of learner strategies: learning strategies, production strategies and communication strategies. According to this view, learning strategies are the means by which the learner processes the L2 input to develop linguistic knowledge. Production strategies, on the other hand, involve learners' attempts to use L2 knowledge they have already acquired efficiently, clearly and with minimum effort (in Faerch and Kasper 1983:72-73 and Ellis 1985:13) while communication strategies consist of learners' attempts to communicate meanings that are beyond their linguistic competence by using such devices as paraphrase or gesture.
While the distinction between learner strategies (i.e. any strategies used by learners) and learning strategies (i.e. strategies used to process input) is a logical one and has been maintained by writers such as Wenden (1987, 1989) and Skehan (1989), this has not been the case in the United States where the term "learning strategy" is used to refer to any type of strategy used by learners. This is not a confusing as it might appear, however, since writers on both sides of the Atlantic (and elsewhere) now recognise that learning can take place through communication (Faerch and Kasper 1983: xvii) and production, as when a writer is forced to reprocess "old" information and language at a deeper level in order to express new meanings or more subtle nuances. Strategies that are used to manipulate or transform cognitive material are now generally known as "cognitive strategies"
Nevertheless, strategies are not easy to define. As Ellis (1993:9) points out, "there is no agreement on exactly what (…) learning strategies are, how many of them there are, what they consist of, etc".
One problem is that the term "strategy" is widely used in psychology, education and applied linguistics, each of which has its own interests and its own theoretical approaches and research methodology. These differences, although they should not be exaggerated, have been notable in the past. In applied linguistics, for example, earlier definitions of strategies tended to stress their behavioural aspects simply because much research at that time was based on observation of what good language learners did to learn a language, whereas psychology took a more "mentalist" approach. Thus, Rubin (1975:43) originally defines strategies as "techniques or devices which a learner may use to acquire knowledge" and twelve years later she still stressed "what learners do to learn" as well as "what learners do to regulate their learning" (Rubin and Wenden 1987:19. italics in original).
By contrast, Gagné (1977:35) sees strategies as "skills by means of which learners regulate their own internal processes of attending, learning, remembering and thinking", and more recently Best (1986:463) writes: "Strategies are seen in behaviour, but the behaviour implies some sort mental effort. A strategy can therefore be defined as a move, trial or probe designed to effect some change in a problem and provide information by doing so." Best divides strategies into two broad classes: heuristics and algorithms, which are described in the psychology literature in connection with problem-solving.
These differences are nevertheless questions of emphasis rather than fundamental disagreements and the same is true of distinctions made within particular disciplines.
In education, for example, a "strategic approach" has been contrasted with a "deep approach" and a "surface approach" (Entwistle 1987:60). What was most distinctive about the strategic approach was the use of well-planned and carefully organised study methods or "study strategies". More recently, however, study skills or strategies have been introduced within a more general framework that emphasises "deep strategic approaches" (Entwistle 1987:69).
Similarly, differences in emphasis (admittedly more subtle ones) are to be found in applied linguistics among writers who have turned to information processing models for a theoretical framework in which to describe learning strategies. Rubin (in Wenden and Rubin 1987:19) following O'Malley et al (1983) defines learning strategies as "any set of operations, steps plans routines used by the learner to facilitate the obtaining, storage retrieval and use of information". This definition, while excellent as far as it goes, seems to be based partly on the structural multi-store model of memory and says nothing about levels or depth of processing. Significantly, although Wenden and Rubin mention learning style in passing (1987:22), this concept-, which includes "deep" and "shallow" approaches-, is not developed in their work.
O'Malley and Chamot (1990), on the other hand, take a more process-based view derived from Anderson's (1983-1985) ACT* cognitive architecture. For O'Malley and Chamot, learning strategies are "special ways of processing information that enhance comprehension, learning or retention of the information" (1990:1), and while advocating that certain strategies should be taught to all students, they recognise (at least implicitly) that different learners prefer to process information at different levels. For example, "a visual learner may naturally use imagery as a preferred strategy, and a field-independent or analytic learner may naturally gravitate toward strategies such as grouping and deduction" (1990:163).
When we learn a new concept, we need to know which attributes are relevant and which irrelevant. We also need to know in what way the new concept is similar to or differs from other concepts and whether these are related hierarchically or not.
Irrelevant attributes may lead to definitions that are either too broad or too narrow. One definition which is too broad, I think, is that offered by Wenden (in Wenden and Rubin 1987:6-7), who claims that learner strategies refer not only to learner behaviours but also "to what learners know about the strategies they use" and "what learners know about aspects of their (…) learning other than the strategies they use". While such knowledge is invaluable for effective strategy training (see Oxford 1990:12), and may lead to learners discovering new strategies unassisted, the proof of the pudding is surely in the eating.
By contrast, Seliger's (1984) distinction between strategies and tactics makes the concept of strategy too narrow. Seliger claims that strategies are "basic abstract categories of processing" in contrast to tactics, which "evolve to meet the demands of the moment or fluctuate more slowly…" (1984:41). This distinction recalls Gagné's (1977:36) claim that "cognitive strategies are largely independent of content, and generally apply to all kinds (of content)". But as Gagné himself recognises, "these mental operations must have something to work on – they cannot be exercised in a vacuum" (1977:37).
Seliger's distinction would only be meaningful if strategies were innate and tactics were learned (which he does not say) since all strategies must begin by meeting the demands of some moment or other, whether or not they are later generalised to other context. If, as Harlow (1959) claims, strategies consist of a general skill or a simple rule or code (Gross 1992:196), then it is likely that strategies become generalised in much the same way as skills through "tuning". (See also O'Malley and Chamot 1990:43).
Another problem that arises when defining strategies is whether to consider them as a process or a product of learning or both.
Both Faerch and Kasper (1983) and Ellis (1985) make a distinction between strategies and processes. Ellis (1985:166) defines strategies as "plans for controlling the other in which a sequence of operations is to be performed" while processes are "operations involved in the development or realisation of a plan".
In this sense, processes are subordinate to strategies. Faerch and Kasper (1983:29), on the other hand, point out that among other possible explanations, the term strategy may refer to "a specific subclass of processes". My own view is that it is not possible to separate the plan from the process (otherwise strategies cannot be described in behavioural terms either). In this sense, I would agree with Faerch and Kasper in considering strategies to be special kinds of processes.
The literature on learning strategies is confusing because, in the past, psychology, education and applied linguistics had quite different research agendas. In applied linguistics, the move from describing strategies in terms of behaviour to explaining them in terms of underlying mental processes reflects the abandoning of behaviourism as a general theory of learning in favour of models drawn from cognitive psychology. However, the problems of deciding whether strategies as universally valid procedures or a reflection of individual learning style, or whether they are best considered as generalised skills as distinct from responses to concrete situations, are difficult to grasp without understanding, too, how theories of memory and problem-solving have evolved over the years.
The broader challenge is understand how learning strategies interact with the learner's existing communicative competence in order to enhance learning. O'Malley and Chamot's adoption of Anderson's ACT* cognitive architecture (which may, itself, soon be superseded by connectivist models) unwittingly challenged the notion of language as a discrete set of competences, among which strategic competence originally played a relatively minor role, suggesting, as many psychologists already believed, that language is a skill like any other and that language learning is parasitic upon other more general cognitive processes.
In a sense, the wheel has come full circle in applied linguistics: Behaviourism was atheorethical in that it was not interested in mental processes; by failing to make explicit the theoretical framework on which they based their description of learning strategies, O'Malley and Chamot and Oxford simply exchanged one set of recipes for another.
But teachers always need to be clear about the theoretical underpinnings of what they teach in the classroom, don't they?
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Douglas Andrew Town BSc (Hons) Psychology, MA (English Language Teaching), Diploma in Translation (Spanish) Profesor de la Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina (Licenciatura en Inglés).