Analysis of 5th grade students’ reactions and opinions regarding language learning strategies from a private school in Concepción, Chile

Abstract

Listening has a fundamental role in many aspects involving relations amongst people (Iwankovitsch, 2001); however, it is a known factor among teachers that listening is the skill with the lowest focus in an EFL context. In order to help solving this problem, the development of learning strategies has taken place in English teaching not only for improving the listening skill, but also to strengthen the learning of English as a foreign language. The idea of learning strategies is to promote the autonomy of students aiming to give them the tools necessary for their cognitive development. For a proper learning of these strategies, it is necessary to teach them explicitly (Oxford, 1990); notwithstanding, in a Chilean scholar context it has been proved that learning strategies are not usually implemented by teachers in an explicit mode. This research aims to observe students’ reactions and opinions regarding the explicit teaching of Language learning strategies for listening and analyze the retrieved data. It was conducted in a private school, specifically in 5th grade. The information was collected from 32 students whose age varied from 10 to 11 years old and the teacher of the English language. The following study corresponds to a descriptive research study. It was determined that 4 interventions were to be applied to explicitly teach Language Learning Strategies (henceforth LLS) after a structured observation checklist and an interview with the teacher. To gather data regarding the students a questionnaire was applied to the students regarding the frequency in which they used LLS. The researchers also had an anecdotal record in which they kept note of different aspects of the students during the interventions. It was observed that teaching LLS explicitly gives students the chance to understand the purpose of the strategy and how to use it properly in the tasks given or in other educational situations.