A “specific plan, action, behavior, step, or technique that individual learners use, with some degree of consciousness, to improve their progress in developing skills in a second or foreign language” (Oxford & Schramm, 2007, pp. 47-48). These plans, actions, behaviors, and so on, can be placed on three continua, ranging from conscious to unconscious, from explicit to implicit, and from observable to non-observable (Finkbeiner, 1998, 2005). Furthermore, learning strategies can be categorized into major groups, for example, by distinguishing cognitive, metacognitive, and social and affective strategies (O’Malley & Chamot, 1990).
Published in Chapter:
Developing L2 Strategic Competence Online
Claudia Finkbeiner (University of Kassel, Germany) and Markus Knierim (University of Kassel, Germany)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 26
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-895-6.ch022
Abstract
Research on CALL environments that explicitly focuses on the development of strategic competence is almost non-existent. This chapter reports on an exploratory study which was conducted as a semesterlong, Web-based project to facilitate the development of L2 strategic competence by means of online collaboration among advanced EFL (English as a foreign language) learners who are students in an EFL teacher education program at a German university. The project—called the “Online Learner ABCs”—combines an autobiographic approach to raise the learners’ awareness of their own strategy use with data-driven activities to foster diagnostic skills with regard to strategy use. Overall, the “Online Learner ABCs” was found to be conducive to the students’ development of L2 strategic competence, in particular by raising the students’ awareness of a considerable number of language learning strategies. Deep-level reflections on strategy use, however, remained scant, indicating that further instructional fine-tuning is needed.