Adult Language Learning Strategies and Their Pedagogical Implications

Abstract

Recent research has shown that language learners begin relying on their ability to analogize, systematize, and regularize the target language data to which they are exposed immediately upon beginning to learn a new language. Because of their lack of familiarity with the new linguistic system, however, they also rely extensively on their native languages for support. With increased proficiency in the target language, they rely proportionately less frequently on their native language grammar, and rely more frequently on their ever-increasing knowledge of the target language, coping directly with it and overgeneralizing its rules. Since student errors are inevitable, regardless of the mode of instruction or the teaching materials employed, a remedial approach involving review, contrast, and re-review seems necessary. It is with students who have already learned some of the target language that this approach can be most profitably undertaken in order to re-acquaint the students with the intricacies of the target language grammar and to help them learn to use the target language rules which they have already mastered in an appropriate way.