Cross-Cultural Differences in the Use of Learning Strategies by Students of Greek as a Second Language

Abstract

This paper discusses culture-specific learning strategies of 177 students learning Greek as a second/foreign language in an academic setting. The study reports on descriptive statistics of the data collected through implementation of the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and processed in order to determine frequency of learners’ strategy use and the affect of variables on the choice of learning strategies. The results showed that of the independent variables of gender, age, language proficiency level and cultural background, the latter was the single most powerful variable that indicated significant differences in the choice of learning strategies. The paper also examines teacher preferences regarding preparation and presentation of teaching material, types of in-class and out-of-class activities, as well as teacher–student relations, in order to investigate how teaching practices and behaviours relate to learning strategies employed by students.

Keywords:

• cultural differences
• individual differences
• learning strategies
• teacher preferences

Notes

1. The number of subjects who provided demographic information in different questions varies and the values recorded concern only the answers given for each variable.

2. The native languages of the participants were: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Czech, English, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

3. Such pairs of positive and negative statements can be found in the questionnaire in the following: q10 & q30, q8 & q27, q9 & q29, q13 & q14, and q6 & q22.

4. One should bear in mind that all students were adults and that the age groups measured were not equally distributed.

5. The majority of students were at an elementary level. Here it can be noted that when research is conducted in class, one cannot always have the advantage of selecting and equalising numbers and levels of proficiency but has to work with whatever numbers and levels are available at the time of the investigation.