First questions - Introduction

1.   What is a strategy?

If we interpret a “strategy” from the point of view of a learner, I would say that it refers to all the activities the student does so as to acquire knowledge or understand new content. However, if we talk from a teacher’s perspective, I think it has to do with the activities or methodologies they use to get their students successfully into a task.

2.   What are strategies mainly used for?

They are tools that learners and teacher have that they know will work effectively and will help them to achieve a goal, for instance to learn new vocabulary or to motivate students into a reading task.

3.   Do you use any language learning strategies? If so, which ones?

As a student I used to read page by page of a unit and then I would write a summary with the main information, or if the unit was not so thick I used to create a mind-map. Sometimes it was very helpful to explain others what I had learnt, for example my parents or my own classmates. This way I made sure that I had understood and embraced what I had read.

4.   What language teaching strategies are you familiar with?

I do not really remember the name of any but I guess that each teacher has its own “tricks” or techniques for a class. For example, in my case I have students who never remember that “people” is plural and so they always write “people is”. I once told them that they could associate the sound of “bipolar” in Spanish to remember “people are”.

5.   Are the kinds of strategies mentioned above different from communication strategies? If so, in what ways?

I think there is a difference between communication and language teaching/learning strategies. Communicative strategies are based on getting someone’s message across, for instance using gestures or faces to achieve it.