Sun, Aug 13, 2006 page8

• Teach strategies, not just English

  • By Kao Shih-fan (高士凡)
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  Due to the strong demand for learning English in Taiwan, there is a bewildering range of quick and easy courses, promising that "You will speak English like a native speaker within one month," or "You can master English grammar within just 10 minutes."

  Of course, most of us know that there is no miraculous formula for overnight success in English learning. But many learners are disappointed at their progress after completing a course. The courses offered by private schools may provide a good start or refresher; but due to the huge complexity of second language acquisition, a great deal more than the contents of any one English course is required for competence in the language, much less native-speaker "fluency."

  Although acquiring a high level of English proficiency has no short cut, it does not have to be a difficult and tortuous task if learners have a battery of effective strategies. Current research suggests that the persistent use of a comprehensive set of strategies for language learning is among the main factors that determine how well non-native learners ultimately acquire English -- and this applies whether the student is in a traditional English classroom or working through a self-study program.

  One of the most important missions that a qualified English teacher should undertake is to teach students strategies for effective learning.

  Although strategies-based instruction is a relatively new approach to foreign language education, it is gaining in popularity, and certainly cannot be ignored in the profession of English Language Teaching (ELT), especially in this era of communicative, interactive and learner-centered teaching.

  Put simply, strategies-based instruction focuses on teaching learners the principles of successful learning and helping them develop their own strategies for success. Based on my own research, it is clear that many English teachers in Taiwan are actually quite dedicated in the classroom -- they work hard, cover a lot of words and phrases, and impart a solid core of grammatical knowledge.

  Some people say that many teachers are simply "teaching for tests," but students undeniably do acquire at least some linguistic knowledge from even the worst English teachers.

  However, in almost all cases, teaching the English language in only in classrooms cannot make learners acquire a high or native-like level of language proficiency, which may partly explain why many learners in Taiwan do not consider their English good or even passable after six years of studying it in high school.

  In my opinion, one of the fundamental reasons for this problem is that English learners don't have effective learning strategies to continue their own English learning after they leave the language classroom.

  In other words, though making great effort to teach English in the classroom, teachers often neglect one more important duty -- helping students to ultimately become independent learners. In doing so, it is compulsory for a teacher to teach students effective strategies for continuous learning.

  While students might learn some English while under their teacher's instruction, they tend to forget or stop using what they learn after leaving the classroom. And let's face it: Students will leave the language classroom sooner or later. Some day, they will be in charge of their own English learning.

  To continue learning and achieve success in language proficiency, students need to develop their own strategies for lifelong learning. And this must happen while they are still in the classroom. This is basically the core philosophy of strategies-based instruction.

  In the reading class I taught, I emphasized guidelines and exercises for reading awareness and practice -- the text I chose had these facilities embedded throughout the whole book. I found that incorporating reading strategy training into regular classroom activities was well liked by my students, who looked upon enhancing their reading strategies as a means of improving their current reading ability and developing their own preferred long-term reading skills.

  Furthermore, for the entire year, I kept reminding students of what good readers do while reading texts. For example, instead of being bothered by unknown words, good readers almost always apply their previous background knowledge for the interpretation of a text, skim the text for the gist of it, scan the text for specific information, and make intelligent guesses when they are uncertain of particular words or phrases. The list of intelligent reading strategies is long.

  At the end of the class, many students wrote in the course evaluation survey that this was the first time they had been taught many key reading strategies such as skimming and scanning, and most of them thought that the "how to read effectively" skills were really useful and helpful to developing their own strategies.

  As the linguist Douglas Brown says, one crucial, if not the most important, aspect in successful language instruction is to equip students "with a sense of what successful language learners do to achieve success and to aid them in developing their own unique, individual pathways to success."

  English teachers should offer classroom instruction that is strategy-enriching to make their teaching much more effective and efficient in helping students develop English skills. Indeed, teaching students the effective language-learning strategies and helping them develop their own is indispensable.

  The teacher should bear these basic questions in mind when teaching English: What successful language-learning strategies should students learn? How can I help my students be aware of their learning styles, and get them to practice good language-learning strategies? And how can I encourage my students to develop their own effective strategies for English learning?

  Without a whole battery of effective learning strategies, English learners will not begin to take charge of their own learning and extend their learning in their daily life after leaving the language classroom.

  Teaching is an art; teaching English doubly so. There are many elements involved in effective language pedagogy. My point is to give readers (either English teachers or learners) food for thought about one essential component -- strategies-based instruction.

  To sum up, having students trained to develop strategic competence in learning English not only makes the teaching more effective but also helps the students become autonomous language learners in the long run.

  Kao Shih-fan is an assistant professor at National Taipei College of Business.
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