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Language learner strategies

No modern language teacher, researcher or policy-maker needs to be reminded of the enormous changes that have taken place in modern foreign language teaching and learning over recent decades. We have gone from a world of translation and grammar to one of the four skills and the pupil as host or tourist. This move has been symptomatic of a general shift in the principles of language teaching and learning, away from a focus on syntactic and structural knowledge to one on communicative competence and interaction. Such changes in perspective have also gone hand in hand with other language policy developments. We have seen ‘languages for all’ come and go. We have also seen the target language focus of communicative language teaching eclipsed by a return to grammar and explicit knowledge about language. Other agendas have emerged: autonomy, primary language learning, language across the curriculum, etc. This Special Issue, which is divided between Volume 35, Number 1 and Volume 35, Number 2 of the Language Learning Journal, focuses on language learner strategies. The attention given to learner strategies arises from a conviction on the part of a group of researchers, teachers and teacher trainers that these strategies have a potential to raise the achievement of our pupils. Language learner strategies are associated with research undertaken over three decades into what makes the ‘good language learner’, in the belief that if we can find out why some learners are successful, then maybe we can teach what they do to the rest. This research has given rise to a large quantity of data which shows how successful learners have at their disposal a whole repertoire of tricks, tactics, skills—strategies—to make language learning work for them. Of course, it is not as simple as that. We shall see that language learner strategies raise questions of definition. For example, what is the difference between a learning strategy and a learner strategy? Such questions lead to others: