EXPLICIT TEACHING OF STRATEGIC COMPETENCES

EXPLICIT TEACHING OF STRATEGIC COMPETENCES

Selin, Per

In this paper it will be argued that strategic competences (Bachman, 1990) can be explicitly taught and that it is also important that it is taught. Pupils will not acquire it naturally, at least not as effectively as they will learn it by means of an explicit teaching. The empirical data for this paper come from two learning studies (Marton et al, 2004) informed by variation theory (Marton & Booth, 1997, Lo, 2012). Learning study is a research approach, as well as an approach to school development, where a specific piece of learning, an object of learning, is chosen by a research group consisting of teachers sharing subject and pupils (teaching the same age levels) and a researcher. The object of learning should be something that is considered particularly troublesome and/or important for the pupils to learn. It is an iterative research design where action research is fused with design experiment. The learning studies have been carried out in school year 8 and school year 10 in two different Swedish schools. The pupils have been doing various kinds of interaction exercises and pre- and post-tests have been used to decide whether any learning among the pupils can be detected and if so to what extent. The results in this paper show that through the explicit teaching of the crucial parts, the critical aspects, of the strategic competence of adapting oral language, learners of English as a foreign language in Sweden improved their ability to interact orally. This result is in line with the discussion in Kasper and Rose (2002) where it is also argued that the developing of strategic competence is enhanced through explicit teaching. The result from this paper additionally shows that learning study is a possibility to improve foreign language learning.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

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