ESL strategy use and instruction at the elementary school level: a mixed methods investigation

In Québec, Canada, an education reform instigated a program which makes language learning strategies integral to the ESL curriculum and requires teachers to teach strategies and to assess students' strategy use. Nevertheless, to date, few studies have investigated children's strategy use and, even fewer, the effects of strategy instruction on success in ESL amongst children. The assessment of strategies among children also offers a particular challenge to researchers, as traditional assessment methods are not always applicable. The research questions for this mixed methods study aim to investigate children's learning strategy use and to assess the effects of instruction on student strategy use. The study will focus on the impact of strategy use on oral interaction tasks in an authentic context. The setting is the elementary ESL classroom in Québec. The study is comprised of two parts; a) a general survey study and b) a case study. The survey study was carried out among participants from 6 different classes of Québécois 6th graders (n=138) with the aim of identifying and describing general patterns of strategy use among them. The results showed that the children, as a whole, used mainly affective and compensatory categories of strategies, such as asking for help and risk-taking. There were also significant effects for proficiency level, with the high proficiency learners reporting using more affective and cognitive strategies than the low proficiency learners; motivation (liking English) was also a significant variable that influenced the children's overall strategy use. For the case study, a sub-group of the participants from the survey study was used. The goals were to investigate the effects of instruction on students' strategy use in the ESL class, and to assess the impact of their strategy use on success in ESL oral interaction tasks. Two intact, similar groups of participants from two different schools served as a treatment group (n=27) and a control group (n=26) in the quasi-experimental part of the research. Care was maintained to apply rigorous assessment methods to the data collection and analysis of this study. Quantitative and qualitative data (e.g., questionnaires and videotapes of classroom proceedings) provided seven sources of evidence to support the findings of this investigation, which lasted four months. Innovative techniques were devised for teaching and assessing strategies among children. Assessment techniques took into account the nature of children, and the context in which these participants were studying English, especially with regard to ongoing assessment for learning, as advocated by the Québec Ministry of Education. Findings of this study indicate that: a) strategy awareness and use were enhanced following instruction; b) the strategy intervention group showed statistically significant gains on the oral interaction measure from pre- to post-test; and c) the strategy intervention group outperformed the control group in a planned comparison statistical analysis of post-test oral interaction results. This study has implications for the fields of research methods, language teaching pedagogy, learning strategies, strategy instruction, and strategy assessment, among children who are learning a second or foreign language. The literature in these areas among children who study ESL as a required school subject is scant and this research begins to fill the gap.

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