A study of the learning strategies used by secondary school and university students of English in Spain

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify the type and range of the language learning strategies used by Spanish secondary and university learners in their study of English. For the collection of data, eighty students and twenty five teachers of both educational levels were interviewed. The data collected were statistically processed through the Chi-square test. The results obtained indicate that (a) the majority of the students were conscious of their use of strategies, (b) cognitive strategies were by far the type of strategies most commonly reported, (c) university students made use, although not significantly, of a higher number and a wider variety of strategies than secondary school pupils, (d) the majority of the teachers were not aware of their students' use of strategies. The paper concludes by making a series of pedagogical recommendations that can be gathered from the previous work.