Abstract
The present doctoral thesis investigates the degree of language learning strategy use among high school student population in Thrace, Greece, in relation to the learners’ self-reported confidence about the employed strategies’ effectiveness. This parallel investigation of both strategy use and confidence in the strategy’s effectiveness aims to explore the students’ conscious involvement in their learning through this new parameter, confidence, and the extent to which it affects the learner’s strategic choice. Frequency of strategy use and self-reported confidence were investigated in relation to language proficiency level, gender, and cultural background, aiming to enhance second language learning by promoting targeted strategy instruction, according to the learner’s specific needs. The novelty of this thesis is the new parameter of confidence for further investigation of the LLS potential, namely the Confidence Hypothesis in the Effectiveness of Specific Strategies (CHESS) which depic ...
The present doctoral thesis investigates the degree of language learning strategy use among high school student population in Thrace, Greece, in relation to the learners’ self-reported confidence about the employed strategies’ effectiveness. This parallel investigation of both strategy use and confidence in the strategy’s effectiveness aims to explore the students’ conscious involvement in their learning through this new parameter, confidence, and the extent to which it affects the learner’s strategic choice. Frequency of strategy use and self-reported confidence were investigated in relation to language proficiency level, gender, and cultural background, aiming to enhance second language learning by promoting targeted strategy instruction, according to the learner’s specific needs. The novelty of this thesis is the new parameter of confidence for further investigation of the LLS potential, namely the Confidence Hypothesis in the Effectiveness of Specific Strategies (CHESS) which depicts the learners’ opinion about the effectiveness of the language learning strategies they employ. The learners are asked how frequently they use each learning strategy and also how effective they consider the specific strategy is. Self-reported CHESS, investigated together with the frequency of strategy use, is expected to yield interesting results regarding the learners’ attitude towards LLS, which can in turn contribute to successful language learning. Additionally, an alternative measurement scheme is used instead of the Likert scales, the Vougiouklis & Vougiouklis bar (V&V bar) in its electronic form, minimizing possible participants’ strain and fatigue and enabling the researcher perform multiple processing of the data, in the fastest possible, as well as accurate and reliable way. The learners answered the Individual Background Questionnaire (IBQ) and the 29-item SILL questionnaire (Petrogiannis & Gavriilidou, 2015) in Greek, which is a shorter version of the 50-item SILL, Version 7.0 (Oxford, 1990). The 321 participants were minority and non-minority learners from mainstream public high schools in Komotini, aged 12-15 (N=321) learning English as a foreign language.6 | P a g eAll analyses and statistical calculations were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 21.0. The analysis of the results revealed a medium frequency of strategy use and respectively, medium self-reported confidence. With the exception of affective strategies, among beginners in English, girls reported higher use of all other strategies significantly more frequently than boys. Also, apart from the affective and social strategies, among girls, beginners reported a significantly higher frequency of use compared to advanced language users. Among minority students, girls reported higher use of compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies significantly more frequently than boys, yet, among boys, non-minority students reported higher use of compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies than minority learners. Descriptive statistics of frequency of use and CHESS revealed that even though affective, followed by metacognitive, compensation, social, cognitive, and finally memory strategies presented a higher frequency range of usage, learners self-reported higher CHESS and therefore appeared to higher value first metacognitive, then cognitive, social, affective and least of all compensation and memory strategies.
show more
