In this chapter, we will build upon the review presented in Chapter 4 and describe a series of studies we performed that elicited both general and specific information about strategies, the students who use them, and the second language tasks with which the strategies are used. The first study attempted to define and classify strategies used in second language acquisition and used retrospective interviews with students learning English as a second language. The second study extended this purpose and again used retrospective interviews to identify strategies in second language acquisition but with native English-speaking students learning foreign languages. The third study was designed to build on the definitions and classifications established with retrospective interviews by using thinkaloud data collection to probe in greater depth the ways in which individual strategies are used by ESL students on a listening comprehension task. The final study reports the results of think-aloud interviews conducted longitudinally with students learning foreign languages.

Study 1: learning strategies used by beginning and intermediate ESL students

At the time we began our first study of learning strategies in second language acquisition, we were aware of most of the research discussed in the previous chapter, with the exception of a few specific studies using questionnaires in second language acquisition (e.g., Oxford 1986; Padron and Waxman 1988; Politzer and McGroarty 1985; Zimmerman and Pons 1986), which emerged later. There had been no studies performed of strategies used by students learning English as a second language, and no integration of the separate work performed in cognitive psychology and second language research.