An exploratory study of students’ learning strategies in a first year university Italian language course

You are here

Research and Development in Higher Education Vol. 25: Quality Conversations

July, 2002, 794 pages
Published by
Tony Herrington
ISBN
0 908557 54 X
Abstract 

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategies for written language retention, being used by first year university students undertaking a course in second languages. In attempting to gain an indication of strategy usage, building on the work by Oxford (1993) and others, students from two groups with different levels of proficiency in the second language were surveyed on the frequency with which they used a range of learning strategies. Analysis of the data revealed little difference between the groups. Generally most strategies were used and a small number were not used on a regular basis. Findings indicate that there are some learning strategies that students could use to their benefit more often and this could perhaps be encouraged through more specific strategy training in the classroom.

Keywords: First-year student experience * Language learning strategies * Higher education