Week 9 Response

Can I just say how excited I was to read this section?  Since I began working as a Spanish tutor at the Visor Center here on campus, I have constantly been reminded of the importance of learning strategies in the foreign (or second) language classroom.  When reading extended passages or writing compositions, I always begin by asking my tutees what strategies or tools they use to complete the task.  Oftentimes I am left with blank stares.  Strategies were something so engrained into my learning experience that it was easy to forget some students never acquired them.  Tutoring made me more aware of the lack of learning strategy use, especially in the language classroom.  Without a solid foundation in L1 learning strategies, how can our students hope to transfer such knowledge to their L2?  This personal control over one's learning (122) can be tied to last week's article about the importance of utilizing and supporting the native language of our students.  So first, we must provide an atmosphere where the native language is embraced.  Then we must explicitly instruct (126) and model to our students language learning strategies (122) so that they may be internalized and utilized independently by the learner (125).

One quote I found particularly interesting was, "Investigators have found a statistical link between students' L2 learning strategies and their underlying learning styles.  These styles are often directly related to culturally inculcated values" (127).  Undoubtedly, these are important issues to confront in the ESL classroom.  As with most things that are worthwhile in teaching and learning, learning strategy instruction will likely be met with resistance at first--or at least, discomfort.  Students--especially students from a wide variety of cultures and countries--bring particular preferences and attitudes about learning to the ESL classroom.  The truth of the matter, though, is that language learning requires both analytic and more holistic approaches to learning; many times students will gravitate toward one aspect over the other.  Thus, it is our job to start incorporating both types of learning strategies into our instruction consistently and from an early age.

As I stated earlier, my experience at the Visor Center has repeatedly made me think about learning strategies.  In fact, I am currently trying to create a Language Learning Skills Workship series that will be offered to ISU students.  The chapters gave me a lot of ideas for the content and presentation of this material.  You could imagine, then, how disappointed I was to see the warning,"do not separate it as a minicourse on language learning strategies" (128).  Why not?  I understand the benefit or integration into classroom instruction, but isn't some external instruction better than nothing at all?  Can't there will special circumstances in which a minicourse would be acceptable?  This was the most disappointing aspect of the readings for me, but I still hope to continue on with my research and hopefully pilot the series in the spring.