PLLT Chapter.5 summary

Summary – CHAPTER5. STYLE AND STRATEGIES

Process, Style and Strategies
Process is characteristic of every human being. Human beings universally engage in association transfer, generation, and attention. Style is a term that is related to rather enduring tendencies or preferences within an individual. Through style, we can differentiate a person from the other. Strategies are specific methods of approaching a problem or a task, modes of operation for achieving a particular end, planned designs for controlling and manipulating some information. They are like battle plan that might vary from moment to moment, day to day, or year to year, or even person to person.

Learning Styles
The way we learn things and we attack a problem seem to hinge on a link between personality and cognition; this link is a cognitive style. When cognitive styles are specifically related to an educational context, they are usually more generally referred to as learning styles. Learning style might be regarded as “cognitive, affective, and psychological traits that are relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment. Learning styles mediate between emotion and cognition. A few styles have emerged in second language research as potentially significant contributors to successful acquisition.

1) Field Independence
Field independence style is an ability to perceive a particular, relevant item or factor in a “field” of distracting items. On the other hand, Field dependence is the tendency to be “dependent” on the total field. A field independent style enables you to distinguish parts from a whole, to concentrate on something, and to analyze separate variables without the contamination of neighboring variables. On the other hand, field dependent style enables you to perceive the whole picture, the larger view, the general configuration of a problem or idea or event.
Two conflicting hypothesis have emerged about how these are related to second language learning. First, FI is related to the classroom learning. F2 is that FD persons will be successful in learning the communicative aspects of a social language. The two hypothesis could be seen as paradoxical, but the answer to the paradox would appear to be that clearly both styles are important. While the “nature” language learning outside the classroom requires a FD style, the classroom type of learning requires a FI style.

2) Left and Right-Brain Functioning
The left hemisphere is associated with logical, analytical thought, with mathematical and linear processing of information. The right hemisphere perceives and remembers visual, tactile, and auditory images. It’s important to remember that left and right hemispheres operate together as a “team.” Without distinction, both hemispheres are involved in most of the neurological activity of the human brain. The left-right brain construct helps to define another useful learning style continuum, with implications for second language learning and teaching. They think past methods failed because they depended too much on left brain and ignored the importance of the right brain. Stevick concluded that left-brain-dominant second language learners are better at producing separate words, gathering the specifics of language, carrying out sequences of operations, and dealing with abstraction, on the other hand, appear to deal better with whole images, with generalizations, with metaphors, and with emotional reactions and artistic expressions.

3) Ambiguity Tolerance
Ambiguity tolerance concerns the degree to which you are cognitively willing to tolerate ideas and prepositions that run counter to your own belief system or structure of knowledge. Advantages and disadvantages are present in each types: the open -minded and the close-minded. Open-minded person can accept certain exception in language. We should be careful not to be the whole meaningless concepts without criticism. They found that learners with a high tolerance for ambiguity were slightly more successful in certain language tasks.

4) Reflectivity and Impulsivity
In reflectivity, people tend to make a quick guess at an answer to a problem. But in impulsivity, people tend to make a slower, more calculated decision. David Ewing refers to two styles that are closely related to the reflectivity and impulsivity; systematic and intuitive style. An intuitive style implies an approach in which a person makes a number of different gambles on the basis of “hunches”. Systematic thinkers tend to venture a solution after extensive reflection.
Children who are reflective have a tendency to make fewer errors in reading than impulsive children. However, Impulsive persons usually tend to read faster. A few studies have related to R/I to second language learning. Doron found that reflective students were slower but more accurate than impulsive students in reading. It is conceivable that impulsive students may go through a number of rapid transitions of semigrammatical stages of SLA, while reflective persons tend to remain longer at a particular stage with larger leaps from stage to stage.

5) Visual and Auditory Styles
Visual learners tend to prefer reading and studying charts, drawings, and other graphic information, while auditory learners prefer listening to lectures and audiotapes. It’s important to recognize learners’ varying style preferences. It’s also important not to assume that they are easily predicted by cultural/linguistic backgrounds alone.

Strategies
Strategies are those specific “attacks” that we make on a given problem. They are the moment-by-moment techniques that we employ to solve problems posed by second language input and output. The field of second language acquisition has distinguished between two types strategy: learning strategies and communication strategies. While the learning strategies relate to input, the communication strategies pertain to output. Rubin summarized 14 characteristics about good language learner.
1. find their own way
2. organize information about language
3. are creative
4. make their own opportunities for practice in using the language inside and outside the classroom
5. learn to live with uncertainty
6. use mnemonics and other memory strategies
7. make errors work for them
8. use linguistic knowledge in learning a second language
9. use contextual cues to help them in comprehension
10. learn to make intelligent guesses
11. learn chunks of language as wholes and formalized routines to help them perform “beyond their competence”
12. learn certain tricks that help to keep conversations going
13. learn certain production strategies to fill in gaps in their own competence
14. learn different styles of speech and writing and learn to vary their language

1) Learning Strategies
Metacognitive is a term used in formation-processing theory to indicate an executive function, strategies that involve planning for learning , thinking about the learning process as it is taking place, monitoring of one’s production or comprehension, and evaluating learning after an activity is completed. Cognitive strategies are more limited to specific learning tasks and involve more direct manipulation of the learning material itself. Socioaffective strategies have to do with socialmediating activity and interacting with others.

2) Communication strategies
Communication strategies pertain to the employment of verbal or nonverbal mechanisms for the productive communication of information.
*Communication strategies (adapted from Dornyei 1995)
Avoidance Strategies
1. Message abandonment
2. Topic avoidance
The most common type of avoidance strategy is syntactic or lexical avoidance within a semantic category. When a speaker is not sure about one word or sentence, he can express other things by avoiding what you really want to express.
Compensatory Strategies
1 Circumlocution
2 Approximation
3. Use of all-purpose words
4. Word coinage
5. Prefabricated patterns
6. Nonlinguistic signals
7. Literal translation
8. Foreignizing
9. Code-switching
10. Appeal for help
11. Stalling or time-gaining strategies

Strategies-Based Instruction
In strategies-based instruction, “teaching learners how to learn” is important. Wenden asserted that learner strategies are the key to learner autonomy, and that one of the most important goals of language teaching should be the facilitation of that autonomy.
* Direct Strategies
1. Memory strategies
2. Cognitive strategies
3. compensation strategies
* Indirect Strategies
1. Metacognitive strategies
2. Affective strategies
3. Social stratiges