Extending students’ existing learning strategies
- Students develop specific strategies for learning.
- These strategies are applied in particular ways in language learning.
- Bilingual students are able to draw on some language-learning strategies that are not available to monolingual students.
- Students can be taught to use new learning strategies and to build on and extend their existing strategies.
How do students learn?
The two Effective Literacy Practice books list the following requirements for what students need to do to develop and extend their learning.
- imitate
- identify and face challenges, and overcome problems
- understand and help set learning goals
- make connections
- practise
- develop the ability to apply their learning and transfer it to new contexts
- respond to and seek feedback
- reflect on and regulate their learning.
(Ministry of Education, 2003, page 77; 2006, page 79.)
Naiman, Frohlich, Stern, and Tedesco (1996) identify the following ways that effective language learners apply their learning strategies:
- They have an active approach (for example, they imitate, practise, and identify and deal with problems).
- They work with language as a system (for example, they analyse, infer, guess, translate, compare, and build up systematic knowledge).
- They work with language as a means of communication and interaction (for example, they seek out opportunities to use it, develop fluency, and develop awareness of social and cultural meanings).
- They take responsibility for managing their own learning and meeting personal challenges.
- They monitor their language performance (for example, they check, correct, look for new information and examples, and ask for feedback).
(Naiman, Frohlich, Stern, and Tedesco, 1996, page 142.)
In learning their two languages, bilingual Pasifika students will have developed specific strategies for learning an additional language as well as the literacy-learning and more general learning strategies that all students develop. To a greater or lesser extent, Pasifika students will be able to apply these learning strategies in two different language and cultural contexts: a Pasifika language context and an English-speaking context. Effective teachers help all their students to continue extending their learning strategies. Teachers need to be aware that they can also help their bilingual Pasifika students to use their existing language-learning strategies in curriculum learning.
The investigations in this inquiry explore the learning strategies that bilingual students use and suggest ways these can be expanded and built on.
The term ‘strategy’ means a purposeful action or set of actions. The term ‘learning strategies’ is used in LEAP to describe:
- learners’ strategies for learning in general
- learners’ strategies for learning languages
- learners’ communicative strategies for interacting with others in a second language.
Other Ministry of Education resources use it in other ways. For example:
- the two Effective Literacy Practice books describe reading processing and comprehension strategies (in Chapter 5)
- Effective Literacy Strategies in Years 9 to 13: A Guide for Teachers (2004) uses the term ‘strategies’ to cover a wide range of teaching and learning techniques, approaches, and processes.
The two Effective Literacy Practice books also describe key instructional strategies, which are defined as deliberate acts of teaching that focus learning in order to meet a particular purpose.
