Research on good language learners' strategies (e.g., Naiman et al., 1978; Rubin, 1975) has indicated that good language learners willingly and accurately guess, have a strong drive to communicate, are uninhibited about mistakes, take advantage of all practice opportunities, monitor their own speech and that of others, think in the target language, focus on both structure and meaning, and address the affective domains of language learning. More recent research (e.g., Ehrman & Oxford, 1989, 1990; Oxford & Nyikos, 1989; Oxford et al., 1988, 1993) has shown that (a) effective learners use a variety of appropriate cognitive, metacognitive, and social-affective strategies for both receptive and productive tasks, while less effective learners use strategies less frequently, have a small repertoire of strategies, and often do not choose appropriate strategies for the task, (b) females use a wider range of language learning strategies than males, and social strategies are more popular among females, and (c) various factors (e.g., motivation, academic orientation, learning style, cultural background) influence learners' choice of learning strategies. Other studies involving strategy training (e.g., O'Malley et al., 1985) have shown that learners can be trained to use learning strategies although effectiveness of strategy training has not been consistently confirmed. It has also been found that the most effective strategy training involves telling learners explicitly that a particular strategy is likely to be helpful, teaching them how to use it and how to transfer it to new situations and tasks, and linking training with regular classroom language learning activities.
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