Self-regulated cooperative EFL reading tasks: students’ strategy use and teachers’ support

Abstract

The ADEQUA research project has gained empirical evidence on how the situationally adequate use of learning strategies can be facilitated during cooperative reading tasks in the EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom. Two video studies were conducted with ninth-grade EFL learners in German schools: the first (laboratory) study investigated the students’ use of strategies while working in dyads and without teacher support on a given task. The second study, a field study, focused on teachers’ actions to support their students while working on a series of tasks in their regular classrooms. In this paper, we present the findings from a specific subsample of students (n = 30 from the first study and n = 228 from the second one), focusing on (1) the extent to which the students employed specific strategies adequately and successfully, and (2) the types of support actions taken by the teachers and to what extent these actions facilitated the students’ strategy use. The microanalytic approach adopted here allows us to identify those strategies which especially appear to require a teacher's support in order to be employed more adequately and successfully. Furthermore, by distinguishing between teachers’ support actions which are more versus less conducive to self-regulation and facilitating students’ strategy use, we are able to provide recommendations on how to fine-tune teachers’ assistance.

Keywords:

• learning strategies
• self-regulated learning
• L2 reading
• scaffolding
• task-based language learning
• foreign language research

Notes

1. Full project title: ‘Fostering the situationally adequate use of learning strategies in self-regulated, text-based learning environments in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom’; principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner, University of Kassel (Germany), and Prof. Dr. Peter H. Ludwig, University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany). Funded by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG; grant no. FI 684/13–1, FI 684/13–2).

2. These factors were investigated in the ADEQUA study; however, they are not the focus of this specific paper. As we describe the SAM in general, the factors are included in this summary.