CHILDREN'S ESL LEARNING STRATEGIES Strategies

In their Series editors' preface to O'Malley and Chamot's (1990) Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition, Michael H. Long and Jack C. Richards, well-known ESL researchers, comment as follows:

Second language teaching in recent years has moved away from the quest for the perfect teaching method, focusing instead on how successful teachers and learners actually achieve their goals. In the case of teachers, this has led to classroom-centered research on the linguistic, discoursal, and interactional structure of teaching events. In the case of learners, it has led to the study of (1) how learners approach learning, both in and out of classrooms, and (2) the kinds of strategies and cognitive processing they use in second language acquisition (p. viii).

O'Malley and Chamot (1990) deplore the fact that, since the schism between behaviorism and linguistics, cognitive processing has been largely ignored in favor of "acquisition". Acquisition, of course, occurs at unconscious and subconscious levels, and is believed to be most effective when input is made comprehensible. The authors believe that "this notion is only partially accurate, tends to be misleading as stated, and leads to inappropriate consequences for instruction, such as the limited view that a teacher's primary role is to provide comprehensible input" (p. ix). Language learning, rather, involves conscious decisions at both the cognitive and meta

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ignorant of extra morphemes (Note that this is not true of Japanese, whose structure does not follow the English pattern. However, one does not know whether the Japanese child may not have to "correct" a natural tendency for agent-action-object to the proper Japanese language structure). Hence, for the English child, the slow acquisition of the passive form. Hornby (1970) found that first, third, and fifth graders still used contrastive stress as the most common means of topicalization, whereas transformational means increased with age. In the case of Japanese children learning English, they have to contend with such English oddities as the direct and indirect objects of the verb being marked by postpositions and variability; moreover, the verb comes at the end of a sentence in Japanese, thus forcing suspended understanding--which is never the case in English. What cognitive strategies do Japanese children adopt to reorder their Japanese thinking when learning English thinking? One does not know, but one does know that the best strategy will do without contrasting L1 with L2, because this would be a meaningless exercise as well as a confusing one. The best strategy may be to acquire (rather than learn) L2 as a completely novel s

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