Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Answer to Box 5.8
Sample punctuation sentence (see page 97)
Now of old the name of that forest was Greenwood the Great, and its wide
halls and aisles were the haunt of many beasts and of birds of bright song;
Answers to Box 5.8 103

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and there was the realm of King Thranduil under the oak and the beech.
But, after many years, when well nigh a third of that age of the world had
passed, a darkness crept slowly through the wood from the southward, and
fear walked there in shadowy glades; fell beasts came hunting, and cruel and
evil creatures laid there their snares.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1977) The Silmarillion
Acquiring and teaching a new writing system
104

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6
Strategies for 
communicating and 
learning
Most of the time teachers think they know best: they make the students carry out
various activities; they select the language they are going to hear or read; they 
prescribe the language they should produce, all hopefully in their best interests.
But as human beings students have minds of their own; ultimately they decide
how they are going to tackle the tasks of the classroom and the aims of their learn-
ing. Sometimes their choices are visible to us – they put electronic dictionaries on
their desks – sometimes they are invisible decisions in their privacy of their own
heads – they work out translations in their minds. This independence of the
learner from the teacher has been recognized by the tradition of strategies
research, which tries to discover the choices that students are making and to rec-
ognize them in language teaching.
Of course, there are extreme methodological problems with this, as Ernesto
Macaro (2006) has shown. Measuring the invisible contents of the mind has always
been difficult. One way is to ask people what they think they are doing – ‘how do
you try to remember new vocabulary?’ The answer, however, may not accurately
reflect what you actually do, since so much of our language behaviour is subcon-
scious and not available to our conscious minds. Imagine asking a 5-year-old, for
example, ‘How do you learn new words?’ The answer would be meaningless and
bear no connection to how the child is really learning vocabulary. Yet the child
probably has a bigger vocabulary than most L2 students. Introspection is a poten-
tially suspect source of evidence.
Another way of investigating strategies is to look for outward signs of behaviour:
does a student sit at the back of the class or are they always the first to ask a ques-
tion? The problem with this observational evidence is interpretation; we have to
connect what the student appears to be doing with some process in their minds –
an extremely difficult feat scientifically: is a silent student someone who is bored,
deep in concentration or naturally shy? And we have to observe their behaviour in
a consistent way so that someone else would make the same deduction from it. Of
course, we could ask students what is going through their minds, but then we are
back to introspection.
A third way is to get the students to carry out a specific task and to see what
language they produce: ‘Describe this picture to someone over the phone.’ 
While this should yield clear linguistic evidence, the technique is limited to strate-
gies visible from language production; many powerful strategies may have 
no obvious linguistic consequences. Furthermore, it is open to the objection 
that it is essentially the technique of the psychological laboratory; do the results
tell us anything about the real learning or use situations that the students
encounter?

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Strategies for communicating and learning
106
These doubts should be borne in mind when looking at strategies research and
may well be insoluble: exploring the private world of people’s minds is a problem
for any research. Nevertheless, potentially, strategies research leads to interesting
results for language teaching, as we shall see. This chapter looks at strategies for
communication and for learning; vocabulary and listening strategies are dealt
with in the relevant chapters.