A Study of the Learning Strategies Used by Secondary School and University Students of English in Spain

The aim of this paper is to identify the type and range of the language learning strategies used by Spanish secondary and university learners in their study of English. For the collection of data, eighty students and twenty five teachers of both educational levéis were interviewed. The data collected were statistically processed through the Chi-square test. The results obtained indícate that (a) the majority of the students were conscious of their use of strategies, (b) cognitive strategies were by far the type of strategies most commonly reported, (c) university students made use, although not significantly, of a higher number and a wider variety of strategies than secondary school pupils, (d) the majority of the teachers were not aware of their students' use of strategies. The paper concludes by. maldng a series of pedagogical recommendations that can be gathered from the previous work.


Introduction
In the last two decades or so, an important shift has taken place in the field of second language teaching and learning research as scholars have focused mainly on learner's individual factors, leaving aside their earlier and only interest in teaching methods and techniques.Gardner and Lambert, Gardner, Spolsky and Oller showed the importance of attitude and motivation in their studies.Chastain investigated the influence of the so-called affective factors.Schumann referred to the function of social factors.Zampogna, Gentile, Papalia and Silber, Tucker, Hamayan and Genesee, Bialystok and Frohlich were mostly concerned with learner's cognitive variables.Krashen and Rosansky pointed out the influence of the age factor.As far as learning strategies are concerned, research has demonstrated, firstly, the existence of a series of mechanisms and tactics learners put into operation in the language learning process and, secondly, the important implications of these strategies for language teaching as they seem to enhance students' own learning.obtained also indicated that the number of strategies used by the learners correlated with the degree of difficulty of the learning task and, on the whole, students tended to use more cognitive than metacognitive strategies.Furthermore, it was also found that teachers in general were not very aware of their students' strategy use.
By means of a questionnaire, Bialystok surveyed the strategies used by high school students in their learning of French.The data collected showed as before that the use of strategies was governed by the nature of the task, and it also seemed to be directly related to the learners' attitude and not to language learning aptitude.
Ramírez also administered questionnaires to adolescents who were studying French in several New York schools.The information collected revealed that years of language study was an important variable affecting the use of learning strategies.

Purpose
The first purpose of this research was to investígate the students' degree of awareness in their use of language learning strategies and identify the range, type and frequency of the strategies used with particular language activities by a group of Spanish secondary school and university students in their learning of English.The second aim of this survey was to determine to what extent secondary school teachers and university lecturers of English were acquainted with the learners' use of strategies.Thirdly, we were also interested in finding out whether the interview could be considered as a valid and reliable instrument for the investigation of language learning strategies.Finally, the fourth aim of this work was to come up with a series of pedagogical implications that could be of special relevance for language teaching.

Subjects
Interviews were carried out with 50 secondary school students, aged 14 to 20, from six different high-schools located in urban and rural settings of Galicia, and with 30 English Philology students, aged 18 to 24, from the University of Santiago de Compostela.Secondary school students' command and knowledge of the language were not the same among all the students.Their levéis varied from elementary to intermedíate.In contrast, all the university students were advanced learners of English; for the majority of these, the language level can be described as being cióse to Cambridge Proficiency?Spanish was the mother tongue for 78% of the total number of respondents while Galician was limited to 22%.A similar proportion was kept between male and female learners.All of them volunteered to be interviewed so they can be considered as a self-selected group.Furthermore, interviews were also conducted with 10 secondary school teachers and with 15 lecturers' in charge of language courses at the University of Santiago.As before, the majority of them had Spanish as their mother tongue.Their teaching experience varied a considerable degree from one individual to another.It ranged from one year to over fifteen.On this occasion, sex was not taken into account as the number of male teachers was so restricted that comparisons between the two groups according to this factor would not have made much sense.As in the case of the students, they also offered themselves voluntarily to participate in the project.

Materials
Two data collection instruments were used in the study: a student interview form and a teacher interview form.Both interview guides were semi-structured and could be easily compared, as they followed a similar pattern as far as their contení and format were concerned.Obviously, the wording of the questions was different to suit the interviewees.
Students were asked about the strategies they used while teachers were asked about the strategies they observed their students using.
These interviews were divided into three main parts.The first section was a simple introduction explaining the purpose of the study.The second section, the central one, consisted of the elicitation from the subjects interviewed of the language learning strategies used with seven language activities: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, listening, reading, writing and oral expression.The last section was reserved for any further comments students wished to make or any questions they wanted to ask.The complete list of questions for each of these interviews is shown in the Appendix.

Procedures
The interviews with teachers and learners of the two educational levéis were carried out in the Spring semesters of 1989 and 1990.The average duration of these interviews was from 20 to 30 minutes.Spanish or Galician was used according to the subjects' preferred language of personal communication.First drafts were piloted with small groups of subjects to find out whether it was necessary to introduce any changes in the original plan and to see how far we could go along with the interview in the exploration of strategies.All the interviews were conducted individually, that is, on a one to one basis with the exception of those with English Philology lecturers, who were interviewed in groups of five.At that stage of the project, it was felt that interviewing the lecturers in groups of five could favour teachers' reflection upon their students' strategy use and would make the interaction more spontaneous and natural, especially when considering that the preceding interviews with their secondary school colleagues had been at times quite cold and had not provided much information.All the interviews with students were taped.Interviews with teachers were not recorded because most of the respondents explicitly said that they preferred not to be taped and, consequently, it was believed this might have put them on the defensive and bias the replies obtained.Some of the teachers at the end of the session said that before beginning it, they had certain reserves and false expectations about the general objectives of the interview; they thought it could be an implicit test on their teaching skills.
The interviewers had in front of them a list of learning strategies drawn from the literature review (Oxford), to use, if necessary, as prompts with both teachers and learners.These prompts were intended to clarify terminology and to suggest possible alternatives when the level of interaction between interviewer and interviewee was really poor.The members of the interview team were specif ically trained in the conduct of these interviews and were told to refer to this elicitation instrument as the last resort; we were aware of the fact that a continuous and systematic use of this kind could distort our findings.
Interviewers filled in an interview report form immediately after the interview had been completed.On these forms, the different types and number of learning strategies mentioned by the informants were annotated as carefully as possible together with other questions they considered worthwhile mentioning.To verify results, the report forms were later contrasted with the transcripts of the taped interviews and corrections were made when required.Several meetings were also held with the interviewers to clarify difficult issues and to make sure that the coding had been done in similar terms for all the interviews.In this way intercoder reliability was highly accomplished.
The data collected were statistically processed through the Chi-square test to determine whether there existed significant differences between the two groups of learners (Secondary and University students) on each type of learning strategy. 4

Results
The majority of the interviewees appeared to be aware of their use of learning strategies and they were also able to verbalize them.In addition, the interview was a useful instrument to investígate the área of language learning strategies as it stimulated learners' reflection upon their learning process and the number of strategies reported was quite high.The fact that the interviewees constituted a self-selected group and that their attitudes towards this project were extremely positive could have also contributed to this.
A general división was first drawn between direct and indirect strategies.Direct strategies were subdivided further into cognitive, memory and compensation strategies, into 11 main strategies and 28 substrategies.The list of the strategies and substrategies identified are shown in table 1 Using resources for receiving and sending messages: using the dictionary, grammar and phonetics books.
Reasoning deductively: deriving hypotheses and making generalisations by using rules the learner already knows or by comparing examples.Analysing expressions: breaking down a new sentence or word into its component parts; paying attention to wordorder.
Analysing contrastively across languages: establishing connections between English/Galician/Spanish, and between English and other foreign languages.
Translating: before writing, thinking first in Spanish and then translating into English.
Highlighting: emphasizing the most important points and words to remember through highlighting, circling and underlining.

B. Memory Strategies
Creating mental linkages

Applying images and sounds
Associating new language information with familiar concepts already in memory, using mnemonic devices.
Placing new words into a meaningful written or spoken context.
Grouping words into semantic ñelds.
Using imagery: associating words with pictures.
Representing sounds in memory: remembering words by making auditory rather than visual representations of sounds (remembering song titles and certain expressions with a peculiar intonation).Semantic mapping: making outlines and diagrams with key concepts.

Guessing intelligently
Using linguistic clues: guessing the meaning of words in a reading text, guessing what the speakers could be saying in a particular situation.
Using other clues: illustrations and lay-out of text.

Centering your learning
Arranging and planning your learning

Seeking practice opportunities
Evaluating your learning Paying attention: deciding in advance to concéntrate on the main points (selective attention).
Organizing: preparing a language learning notebook.
Listening to English records, trying to understand the lyrics.
Listening to the radio and watching satellite televisión.Watching English films with subtitles in Spanish and keeping record of new words.
Practising orally with other students of the class and with other members of the family.
Looking for native-speakers in town.
Reading bilingual magazines, books, "readers," instructions of electrical appliances, food ingredients, etc. Writing to pen-friends.
Self-monitoring: learning from previous errors in writing.
In spite of the problems experienced on certain occasions in the tagging of the strategies students reported, it can be concluded that the vast majority of the students questioned tended to use a higher number of direct strategies than indirect strategies.As can be seen in table 2, cognitive strategies were by far the most commonly reported.Repetition, creating mental images, applying sounds and pictures, translation, using linguistic and non-linguistic clues, working with the dictionary and, lastly, seeking for opportunities to practise were the types of strategies which obtained the highest number of mentions.It should be pointed out at this stage that prompting was required on only 15 occasions and was chiefly restricted to the questions in which the students were asked about the strategies they used for the learning of grammar and for the development of their listening skills.When the two groups of learners considered in the study are compared according to their strategy use, the figures indícate that university students, generally speaking, employ proportionately a higher number and a wider range of strategies than secondary school pupils.

COGNITIVE, MEMORY, COMPENSATION AND METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES
USED BY SECONDARY SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF ENGLISH (Table 3) In spite of this, it should be added that, according to the probability frequency obtained for this item through the Chi-square test, the differences between the two groups are not statistically significant at the .05level; in other words, from a statistical perspective, the differences that occur in terms of number of strategies used by the two groups are not relevant.In contrast, as can be seen in table 4, significant differences are found with regard to the nature of those strategies.Thus, statistical differences are identified when comparing the valúes corresponding to the cognitive, memory and compensation strategies.This does not apply in the case of metacognitive strategies since the level of significance is higher than the .05valué generally considered by most scholars in quantitative studies as the lowest rate of significance between groups.

COMPARISON OF FREQUENCIES OBTAINED IN THE TWO GROUPS FOR THE
DIFFERENT TYPES OF LEARNING STRATEGIES ACCORDING TO X 2 (Table 4) The data collected also showed that the number of learning strategies reported by students varied depending on the type of learning activity, as presented in table 5.The largest figures of strategies were reported in pronunciation, vocabulary learning and the understanding of readingtexts.In contrast, listening inference and oral expression obtained the lowest number of mentions.This may be due to two factors: first, the degree of difficulty associated with these learning activities; there is a tendency on the students' part to consider listening and speaking as more difficult skills than those involved in the learning of vocabulary and in the decoding of written texts (Palacios); secondly, the type of environment where the students are learning English, which is a foreign language setting; while Spanish students can learn vocabulary items and practise pronunciation on their own without the teacher's help, this does not apply to aural and oral practice, opportunities for which mainly occur in the classroom.N: number of subjects M: mentions Furthermore, when the figures collected for the two groups are compared, the only significant differences found are those corresponding to the strategies learners report using when learning pronunciation.In this case, university students mention proportionately a considerably higher number of strategies than their peers at secondary school; this surely explains the Chi-square and significanee valúes obtained for this item, considering the fact that the former group was formed by only 30 subjects and the latter by 50 (see table 6).The differences found between the two groups with regard to the pronunciation strategies may be related to, at least, two variables: first, the purpose of learning at each level, and secondly, the existence of a specific Phonetics course as part of the English university programme.At the secondary level students chiefly aim at being able to communicate and making themselves understood in the foreign language; this means that pronunciation is important as long as they can express themselves and be understood.At university, however, students are not only satisfied with the achievement of the previous objectives; as they are specializing in English, they also want to sound as cióse to native speakers as possible, henee the high degree of importance allocated to pronunciation.As for the teachers' perception of students' strategy use, the information collected indicated that most of the teachers interviewed at both secondary and university levéis were not fully aware of the students' use of learning strategies.The majority of them were not even acquainted with this área in language learning.Clarification of questions and prompting were more frequently required than with the students.As shown in table 7, teachers were not able to mention a high number and a wide range of strategies as they only referred to 14 substrategies used by their students.This may indícate that foreign language teachers in general devote little time and attention to observing what is going on in the learning process; restrictions and requirements imposed by the educational system may make teachers concéntrate chiefly on the teaching of an official syllabus, disregarding other important aspeets of the teaching and learning processes.

LEARNING STRATEGIES USED BY SPANISH SECONDARY SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF ENGLISH FOR DLFFERENT LEARNING ACTIVITIES (TABLE 5)
The strategies associated with vocabulary learning and the reading and writing of texts were the ones most commonly mentioned.Secondary school teachers overall were in a better position to identify more and a wider variety of learning strategies than university lecturers.This may be justified by the fact that language groups in Spain at the tertiary level tend to be rather large and, as a result, lecturers cannot follow students' progress as closely as in high schools.Furthermore, some innovations recently introduced by the Spanish educational administration in the secondary school curriculum emphasize the role and importance of strategies in the learning process.Quite possibly, secondary school teachers of English may also have been influenced by this recommendation.The main findings of this study indicated that the majority of the secondary school and university students interviewed were able to identify and report the use of a wide range of learning strategies.This means that most learners at an intermediate and advanced level of English proficiency in a foreign language environment use strategies.University students reported a higher number of strategies than high school learners, although the total differences found between the two groups were not statistically significant at a .05level.In contrast, the figures obtained were indicative in the case of the cognitive, memory, compensation and pronunciation strategies.Spanish students of English at the university mentioned more cognitive and pronunciation strategies whereas the opposite trend was identified with memory and compensation strategies.Secondly, cognitive strategies outnumbered by far the rest of the strategies collected.Thirdly, no instances of affective and social strategies were reported by our subjects.Fourthly, the use, number and choice of strategies varied according to the language activity carried out by the learner.Although the research instruments utilized in this survey were not exactly the same as those used in previous studies, these findings only in part confirm the results of past research (Bialystok; O' Malley et al., Ramírez) conducted in second language environments; this, consequently, may question their validity for foreign language settings.Fifthly, the group interview and, particularly, the individual one turned out to be a useful method for the investigation of strategies since learners' self-reflection on their learning process was successfully achieved and the amount of information collected was higher than expected.Finally, this research revealed that Spanish secondary school and university teachers were not fully aware or acquainted with the field of language learning strategies and, theref ore, one may think that strategy training was not introduced into their teaching as an ordinary and well thought-out practice.
Several pedagogical implications for language teaching can be gathered from this research.Firstly, the great variety of mechanisms and strategies mentioned by the learners in this study give us insights into the difficulties students come across when learning a foreign language, i.e. keeping new words in memory, getting acquainted with a new grammatical system, decoding and guessing the meaning of unknown words, strong need for language practice.It also provides valuable and interesting information on the techniques learners resort to when trying to overeóme those problems, i.e. repetition, formal practice, creating mental linkages, analysing deductively and contrastively.Secondly, everything seems to indícate that this factor plays a central role in the learning of a foreign language and, theref ore, teachers should have a full understanding of the different strategies used by their students for learning it as this will shed light on important áreas of their teaching.Thirdly, it is reasonable to think that students' autonomy and selfdirection should be promoted if teachers make them reflect upon their learning and train them in learning how to learn.
The provisional character of our findings and the pedagogical conclusions gathered from them reveal the need for conducting further research into this área to verify results and obtain a deeper understanding.It would be extremely interesting to investígate several variables (sex, age, learning style, motivation, social background), which may affect secondary school and university students' choice of strategies together with the effeets that strategy training programmes may have on learners in the long and short term.Although Oxford's classification was quite useful and practical, it is still necessary to clarify certain labels, expand and modify others with the purpose of being more aecurate and avoiding unnecessary overlapping.
Comparative studies in the use of strategies in the Ll and L2 could also be illuminating and practical.Furthermore, additional research instruments, such as diaries, questionnaires and observation could also be implemented to complete the data collected through interviews.Studies based upon bigger and more representative samples of Spanish students and teachers of English could also make important contributions and would serve to confirm and valídate the results and conclusions reached in this work. .
LEARNING STRATEGIES USED BY BOTH SECONDARY SCHOOLAND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF ENGLISH (Table2)